


The Ones Who Rebuild Us

by PrincessDesire



Series: Deconstruction and Restoration [2]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, F/M, Knights of Ren - Freeform, Not Canon Compliant - Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Seduction to the Dark Side, Soft Armitage Hux, background stormpilot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:15:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 62,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27420301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrincessDesire/pseuds/PrincessDesire
Summary: Snoke is dead and Kylo Ren has gone into hiding. Rey is the only one who stands a chance of turning him. She has a lead on his whereabouts but the closer she gets to finding him, the more the dark side grows within her.This is a sequel to The Things that Don't Destroy Us and it references a lot from the first one, so I suggest starting there.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Rey
Series: Deconstruction and Restoration [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2002105
Comments: 9
Kudos: 24





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A few of the changes to canon/timeline: Leia trained Rey after Luke refused her on Ahch-To and there's one less Knight of Ren. This takes place about a year after the end of The Things that Don't Destroy Us.

Akiva

“Count them again! There should be 844 units!” 

The droid scurries off to obey the order leaving Hux to scowl and squint at his positively drenched datapad. He wipes away some of the water that’s accumulated on his screen, but the clearer view lasts only a moment before the rain refills it.They’re doing this drop in the dark and, apparently, during the worst storm in recent record. Relief efforts must continue regardless, though Hux can barely see beyond the foggy swirls of light emanating from the supply ship and the flood lamps of the warehouse; he’s balanced between the two, one foot inside the bay door and one foot in mud. Every centimeter of him is wet to the extent that he feels he’ll never be dry again. It’s been two hours and they’ll be lucky if they don’t all die from pneumonia following their return to the  _ Observer _ . Hux hates being on planets; they always make him feel like a stationary target just waiting for calamity, maybe in the form of a comet or a giant red planet-powered laser beam, to strike him dead. 

“O-LT counted 2755 nutrient packs!” shouts Granna, appearing suddenly beside him, her hand holding a useless hood down over her slick tattooed face and soggy hair. “Dat right?”

The planet’s surface is illuminated momentarily by a bright zig of lightning on the horizon. He sees Resistance members and natives in a frozen snapshot of activity, then all is dark again. He looks at the numbers. “Right. That’s good.” They’re almost finished. He’s uncertain how they managed to misplace the reclamators between the  _ Observer  _ and here, though, and he puzzles over it until the thunder crashes, shaking the sky and rattling his concentration. He hadn’t been a fan of loud sounds even before his PTSD, but now they create nebulous fears that bubble around his ears. 

Before Granna can walk away, he shouts to her, “Are we putting anything in that other building?” He points into the wet darkness. He’d only noticed it because of the lightning and a desperate need to make sure they bring everything they’ve got for the people here. His father’s upbringing didn’t allow for margins of error, and he wouldn’t want to shake that indoctrination under the circumstances - these people need more than 844 reclamators, certainly more than 832. 

She wiggles one arm, a Mirialan shrug equivalent. “D’know there was one o’er dere!”

“Take this!” He offers her the datapad and she backtracks to grab it. “I’ll be right back!”

“Don’t go ‘lone!” she yells. 

He ignores her. The building looked to be less than 300 meters away. He’s certain he can survive that distance alone, at least now that the First Order is no longer occupying it. He does grab a weighty flashlight from its resting spot on one of the crates as he makes his way across the muddy field. He’s not a complete idiot, after all. 

The planet has been going through a drought, so while this storm is exactly what the inhabitants need, the combination of soil without anchoring plants and torrential water is creating a dangerous slide situation. Hux alternates between having to unstick his boots from the sucking mud and slipping in the shallower slicks. He makes it to the other building unscathed, and though his allies and the bright lights are nearby, he does get a spooky feeling, being over here alone. He looks for a locking mechanism. If there is one that’s activated, he can head back now; no droid would hack into the building of its own volition, but if it’s open, there’s at least the smallest sliver of possibility that one brought a pallet here by mistake. It’s a long shot, but Hux is nothing if not thorough. 

He runs his hands along the outside of the building, the serviceable flashlight not showing him what he’s looking for. By coincidence or sheer frequency, the lightning chooses that time to reappear, and he spots a bay door halfway rolled up on the far right side of the building. He’s able to get over there and duck inside before the next crash of thunder hits. He braces himself, allowing all his muscles to tense as it pulsates the very air. When it passes, he hears something else, a squeaking.

He shines the light into the darkness. There’s a large puddle of water near the opening, but inside farther back, where giant metal boxes reside, it’s dry. He steps further in, passing what he can see are old and dusty boxes, probably empty or filled with useless goods. These are certainly not the missing units. The squeaking is consistent, different from old machinery, but similar in frequency. 

It’s quieter in here, though still loud, the rain mimicking applause, and the air smells dusty, despite the outside conditions. He touches one long slender finger to the outside of a box and it comes away gritty. He can’t read the writing on the boxes. Why would he be able to? He can’t read any Akivan languages. 

As he gets closer to the sound, it picks up in speed, leading him to conclude that it hears him. “Hello?” he asks, not liking how much he sounds like a character in one of the scary holovid movies that Poe introduced Rey to.

The loudest squeak so far rings out and he spots movement, there to the right, in what looks to be a vent lacking a screen. The lifeform that made the sound doesn’t run as he approaches, but the movement becomes more active. He gets to his knees, bending down to shine the flashlight into the narrow space. Baby animals. He hears his own voice and it surprises him, a soothing “Hey, hey shhh… I’m here,” comes from some part of him he would prefer to remain a secret from everyone in the universe. They’re tiny, and he sees, looking closer, malnourished. Two have shut eyelids but open mouths. One, the loudest, stares at him with wide blue eyes. A fourth and fifth are immobile, already dead. 

He reaches out and touches them, the one that can see flinches, but doesn’t have the strength to run away. It does, however, have the strength to emulate a klaxon. Their fur is matted but downy, the parts that aren’t spiky with grime as light to the touch as feathers. Hux is struck dumb by how much he wants these tiny creatures to live. Their continued existence seems unlikely; two of their pack mates have already perished and that’s as clear a sign as any how dire their situation is. He shines his light back towards the open door and the rain outside. He looks back at the vulnerable trio and acts, decision making itself.

Moments later, he’s trudging back through the mud with a pocket full of dying baby animals. His heart is pounding loudly, striking a chorus of the minutes passing by, of time wasting. 

The droid approaches him first. “I count 832 units.”

“Not now,” he snaps at it. “Granna!” he shouts. When she pokes her head out of the warehouse, he asks, “How long will it take to get everything packed up?”

She scans him from his mud-encased coveralls to his matted hair and wild eyes. She shakes her head. “Should nah be more den 45. Why?”

He hopes they can hold on that long.

Rickman is loading up some of the now-empty pallets. When he spots Hux, he looks at him expectantly; the former general has something of a reputation for being too bossy. “I need you to contact the  _ Observer _ and tell them that we need a medic ready for some animal life forms in need of aid.”

“Animal life forms?” asks Rickman.

Hux just nods. He’s not going to repeat the ridiculous sentence, not even for clarification’s sake. His pocket is frighteningly quiet. 

It takes an hour and forty-five minutes before they’re back aboard the  _ Observer _ and, by that point, Hux is a live bomb with vivid ticking numbers. He’s been petting the furry things in his pocket, speaking to them (quietly and with severe embarrassment at the looks it garners him), and praying to Saraboth as he hadn’t since he was a child. He’s heartened to find Doctor Ginevra Boccaree in the hangar waiting to meet them and not Finn who wouldn’t know an aorta from an arugula, despite his time volunteering in medical. 

He runs to her, pulling the small beasts from his pocket and offering them with upturned hands. “Can you help them?” he demands of her, and she takes them with a confident firmness and places them into a carrier peppered with breathing holes. The blue-eyed one positively screams with fear and, he believes, rage at being stuffed in his coat for hours; that’s his favorite. 

“I’ll do my best.”

“They had two dead pack mates,” Hux tells her, warning her that it might be a losing battle.

“Littermates,” she corrects, and while normally he would balk at the irrelevant correction at a time like this, he could weep with relief that she knows their species. “I’ll keep you apprised.”

He watches as she takes the carrier away. He doesn’t like having things out of his hands. He’d rather care for the creatures himself, but the smartest leaders know how to delegate - and he doesn’t know anything about nurturing baby animals. He’s surrounded by Resistance members who have just seen him shaken to his core by injured beasts and he tries to straighten his dented pride. He puts his anxiety in a mental compartment and stacks his current tasks atop it. There are empty pallets to put back in place and a report to write up about the missing reclamators. He will let Ginevra focus on her job, and he will do his best to focus on his own. 

  
  
  


Neilrebmah VII

Rey prematurely releases the rope, and her knees jangle painfully as she hits the dirt below, but they don’t buckle. It hasn’t even been a year; she should not be rusty at her old treasure-hunting ways. The cave around her echoes with the sound of the impact and dust swirls around her. It’s so hot up above where the suns beat down on the desert that it still feels warm here, or maybe she’s acclimating to the too cold temperature on the  _ Observer. _ For some reason, it had never occurred to her that starships would be cold; in all her fantasies of being a Rebel Alliance pilot, she never imagined herself bundled up tight against the combination of cold space and hard steel. She probably would have found it even more inviting, especially on those days when she’d come back to her AT-AT with seared red skin. 

She detaches the portable light from her hip and shines its eerie green glow around her. There’s only one passage that she can see from this area which is good because she’d only been given coordinates, not a map, and she’s hoping that there are not too many branching caves down here. She drops a tracker, syncs it to her comm-bracelet, and calls up to BB8. “I’m going in further!”

Its responding noise is quieted by the distance, but she catches it anyway, a wish of good luck.

She’s been spelunking in caves since she was little, Unkar Plutt happy to have such a small body to send into tight spaces where useful scrap might be found. She guesses that it must have been scary at some point, but she doesn’t remember it being so. Her curiosity has always rivaled her rationality, creating a delicately choreographed dance of survival and limit-testing. Her place in the Resistance has only highlighted this quality in her. Down here she may find serpents or poisonous arachnids, but she’s unlikely to find any person wanting to do her harm. She’d have sensed Kylo Ren long ago if he was here, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing valuable to be found.

The ground beneath her has a well-trod feel, no large stones, only small pebbles that lay flat on the surface. The walls never narrow more than twice her shoulders. This cave is artificial, at least as it currently exists. She keeps her light in front of her held by her non-dominant hand, just in case she does have to reach for her lightsaber. When the tunnel reaches a fork, she studies the ground leading into each route. There is a slight dip to the one on the left. Looking higher to the walls, she sees some erosion on both sides of the left tunnel. She’s found her path, then. She steps to the left, leaving a flare behind her. 

As she walks, she begins to imagine voices, soft ones, whispering to her in indecipherable tongues. There’s no way of knowing if it's her mind playing tricks on her or the remnants of something older. Jusbrann, the pirate who had given her the coordinates, had warned her that it was cursed, something that didn’t really need to be said if it truly was old Sith grounds as he claimed. His jocular spirit and his physical mannerisms had reminded her so much of Poe that she’d felt punched by homesickness or whatever is equivalent for a space orphan, and it probably contributed more than good healthy skepticism mandated to why she’d bought the information from him, trusted that at least he thought there might be something useful here to find. The warning of the curse returns to her mind now, as the whispers grow louder around her, and she’s becoming nervous that it isn’t just fear creating phantoms. Nonetheless, her feet never hesitate, moving with agile, confident steps through the well-worn tunnel.

When she comes upon the large round stone, her heart lurches as though something has jumped out to surprise her, and she reaches for her lightsaber, stopping before she foolishly touches its hilt. The stone is covered in symbols that rotate outwards from the center in a spiral. They must be Sith symbols but it’s not like Leia has taught her to read the language of the dark side. She reaches out a tentative finger, part of her telling her not to touch, but most of her, that dangerously curious part, tells her to touch, to trigger it. When she touches the stone, no warning sirens ring out and no one springs out of the darkness at her; she succeeds only in making her finger dirty.

She steps back so she can see the thing in its entirety. The dark circles above and to the sides are crevices wide enough for her fingers to wiggle into. The stone is blocking an entrance. It’s just crudely shoved against some kind of doorway. Well, this she knows how to fix. She reaches out with her mind, imagining the Force as hands and gives a tug on its side, hoping to use its shape to her advantage, to roll the heavy object out of the way. Oh, it rolls, all right; it practically flies out of the way, and she stares in wide-eyed amazement as it crashes loudly into the side of the tunnel. She looks at the now exposed doorway and back at the stone. Okay, she’s grown in her Force powers but she’s not  _ that _ strong! She walks to it, gives it a push but it appears to be solid, not hollow. Strange. 

Without the stone to block it, something akin to a smell wafts outward from the dark of the newly exposed room, only it’s for this sixth sense of hers. Its inky tendrils reach out, curling at the air, and then ebb back, nearly in a beckoning motion. Rey steps forward into it, with only the small handheld light as a shield. It’s the dark side. It feels like Snoke. It feels like Ren. The pirate’s coordinates had been right, then. 

There are thick rocks, smoothed and shaped into cylinders rising from the floor about a meter high. Places to sit, she thinks. A mural adorns one wall, a terrible thing with crudely drawn humanoid shapes covered over with a red stain, zags of black in places. It makes her think of war, not the kind of war that they wage in the present with lasers, but something ancient, something hand-to-hand and brutal. 

The whispering is louder here, voices of the dead, she realizes. Past Sith. She shouldn’t be able to hear them. She hasn’t even been able to hear the voices of the Jedi who have passed beyond, though she’s tried often, seeking their wisdom in various meditative states. This comes easier somehow. She can’t understand their words, but their essence is clearer. They expect something from her visit here, maybe just from her. They’re frantic to tell her things, to impart their secrets to her. Their lessons are not ones that she ever wishes to learn and so she ignores them, focusing instead on the contents of the room. 

Ahead of her there’s a table, again formed from stone. This has carvings on it too, ones like the door’s, perhaps even the same symbols. Most are eroded, their impact lessened by time. She feels watched as she approaches it, footsteps quieter as she takes more uncertain steps. Well, if deceased dark side users are speaking to her, they must know she’s here. She tries not to think about her mission to end their current archetypes, lest they pick up her thoughts.

Two pyramids, covered in dust, sit within etched squares on the surface of the table. She sets her light down next to them, because, of course, she has to touch these as well. No point in coming this far only to leave mysteries unraveled. She’s not squeamish about touching spiderwebs or dirt, though she does worry about the effect of touching the object, so she places only the lightest of touches on it and she braces herself to be inundated by the voices. Nothing comes, no Force lightning or resounding Snoke laughter.

The first pyramid, when she finally picks it up, sits heavily in her hand, much more so than its size suggests. She rubs at it with the sleeve of her forearm and appraises it in the light. It looks like crystal, opaque and multi-faceted. There are no obvious buttons, but something about the completely clear triangle on its top makes her think that it’s a device rather than just a decoration. 

Inspiration strikes her and she focuses on it with her sixth sense, asking the Force to unlock its secret. A burst of light radiates from the top, shattering the dark of the room, and she gasps, grip tight around her find, remnants of her years scavenging. Above and around her, thousands upon thousands of dots of light fill the air. She’s reminded of how the Jakku sunlight traveled through holes in metal above her creating beams of concentrated light and heat. It’s a projection, but why? The placement of the dots is uneven, clustered in some places, and they vary in size and brightness, and, suddenly, she knows what she’s looking at. It’s a star map! She knows these and has grown so familiar with them over the past few months that it’s silly it took her this long to realize it. 

She tries to find something familiar, but there’s too much. It’s too vast. She sets the device back down onto the table and walks around in the projected space. As she does, her body blocks other stars and she can see them on her arms and legs like she’s made up of a galaxy. After fifteen minutes of scouring the relation of size, big and small, and distance, near and far, she may be no closer to figuring out locations, but she spots one red dot. Suspicion begins to grow in her. She closes the first pyramid and opens the second. When she sees the first slightly pulsing blue dot, after what must be an hour’s time (much longer than the first because her eye doesn’t see the difference between blue and white as easily) she hollers in triumph. 

She places both of the invaluable devices into her bag and makes her way back to the  _ Falcon _ . She takes the time to roll the stone back into place behind her. She doesn’t use as much mental effort, to avoid slamming it, and it slides back into place with efficient ease. Though there’s nothing left to pilfer, she dislikes the idea of disreputable grave robbers trying to find wares to hock, and her hypocrisy goes by without the slightest notice; she’s too busy thinking ahead, of the ramifications of her find. If these are what she thinks they are, she might be wrapping up the fate that the Force has saddled her with sooner than she could have imagined.

  
  
  


The sheer volume of the alarm that goes off on his ankle tracker is so intense that Hux drops the screwdriver, hands covering his ears. He groans from the head-splitting pain as the alarm continues… and continues. Oh, he’s kriffed up this time. He stumbles to the door to his quarters and opens the mechanism. Neighboring shipmates step out of theirs as well, to see what’s going on. It’s just his own idiocy, he would tell them, if he wasn’t too busy trying to keep the siren from permanently removing his ability to do simple maths. They stare at the device, all of them knowing what it is, but with no better idea of how to deactivate it than he has. Eventually, after three centuries of the sound, Betton skids to a halt at the end of the hallway, eyes wide and holding a tool of some sort. Hux has never been happier to see another person.

Betton drops to his knees and sets about putting an end to the terrible cacophony while Hux blushes with guilty embarrassment. Even when it stops, he can still hear residual ringing and he can’t hear whatever Betton says. Soon, he rises from his position on the floor with the metal circlet in his hand, and it’s the first time in nearly a year that Hux hasn’t worn a restraint or monitor of any sort. His head is ringing too much to really care. 

“What were you doing?” shouts Betton. He holds up the metal apparatus and shakes it for emphasis. He looks bewildered rather than angry. He knows that this isn’t an escape attempt, and not just because it was so poorly executed. His trust in Hux is one of the best things he’s found in the universe, and having yet another example of it eases his self-recrimination.

“There’s mud in the joints, from my trip to Akiva. I was trying to scrape it out with a screwdriver.”

“You took a screwdriver to the prisoner tracker,” rephrases Betton incredulously. “A tamper-proof device used to monitor untrustworthy people.” 

Hux lets his lips flatten and go wide. He doesn’t much appreciate the mockery even if he absolutely deserves it for such a tremendous cockup. 

Betton’s eyes sparkle and he reaches out and punches Hux in the shoulder. “Who made you a general?” The insult is meant playfully, but it still stings. He doesn’t have to hide his reaction, though, since the larger man is stepping into Hux’s quarters, taking the conversation out of the hallway, away from the ears of the nearest residents who have mostly drifted away by now, eager to return to sleep.

Betton makes himself right at home, taking a seat on Hux’s bed. It isn’t as though there’s other furniture for him to rest on in the small quarters, but they are a vast palatial estate compared to his cell. Betton peers at the tracker. “Oh, yeah, you aren’t kidding. This thing is gross.”

“There was a storm…” says Hux in short explanation.

Betton has recently taken to dividing his beard into sections, likely a native tradition that should be ridiculous, but that Hux can’t find any fault with, much like the man himself. Hux has never tried to grow his own in any unique way. He’d shaved his hospitalization beard off as soon as he could, ready to feel like a man and not a beast, though that was probably the best opportunity he’d have to experiment with it. The triple-braided beard obscures Betton’s round dimpled cheeks, but his bright white teeth are frequently on display since the man is so quick to smile, so it’s still easy to tell what an affable fellow he is. He offers the pearls now, saying, “Yeah, I heard about that. You’ve come a long way from Starkiller, Chance. The guy on those holorecords wouldn’t have waded through mud to rescue some kittens.”

The guy on those holorecords never existed. That’s something that those around him don’t realize. Hux, the butcher of the Hosnian system, was just a scared kid hiding in Brendol’s shadow. He’s come to realize (through his sessions with Marshall) just how many of the choices he’d made in life were not choices at all, but self-preservation tactics, reactions to threats his conscious couldn’t even allow himself to perceive. He doesn’t say any of this, merely crosses his arms and waits to hear Betton’s solution to his imbecilic late-night cleaning session. 

“You’re lucky this wasn’t one of those nasty ones that zap you when triggered,” says Betton. “I’ll code you up a new one and get it to you in the morning.”

“Are you sure?” asks Hux. “I can’t imagine the powers that granted my provisional reprieve would approve of my wandering around the ship untethered.”

“So don’t wander around. Just sleep. I’ll have a brand new mud-free one for you before you can take your morning piss.”

“Eloquent,” says Hux snidely.

Betton smiles and stands up, pocketing the dirty-creviced anklet. He stretches tiredly while looking at a framed sheet of paper on the wall. Judging by his clothing, baggy linen cloth pants and a sleeveless top, he’d either been in bed or heading there when the alarm notification had gone off. “Aw, she got it framed for you?”

Early into his Resistance recruitment, when Rey was just beginning to learn to read, she had painstakingly written out the poem he’d quoted to her on what he’d thought would be the last night of his life, the night that they’d spent in each other’s arms, providing comfort for all the hardships each had endured and witnessed in each other. He’d had it stuck with a magnet to the wall of his cell on the Raddus, but it had wanted for something more permanent upon his relocation to an actual room. “I made the frame,” he admits, embarrassed. 

“You did that?” Betton asks, obviously impressed. “I didn’t know you were good with your hands. Huh. Lucky Rey, I guess.”

“Not appropriate,” Hux says, shutting down any sexual innuendos immediately. 

“Sorry. You needing any other tech, other than the tracker?”

Hux considers. Brendol had pounded into his son’s head the importance of not relying on luxuries, and so, even as an adult, he feels uncomfortable spoiling himself too much with material goods. Besides, as he’d learned the hard way, life could take a turn and all of those comforts and trappings could be taken from you. He laments the loss of his greatcoat as some would a child, imagines (on his mopier days) the gaberwool garment hanging alone in the closet, a lost symbol of a life abandoned. “Granna mentioned that the light keeps going out on her aeromagnifier. She could probably use a replacement.”

It doesn’t seem like the type of thing to elicit a laugh, but sure enough, the big bearded man tosses his head back and laughs deeply. “A long way, buddy. I tell you. I’ll let you get some sleep.” He shakes his head, still chuckling as he leaves Hux’s quarters.

Well, that had been an adventure. Hux looks at his naked ankle. There are dips in his skin from where the loop normally sits. It’s not uncomfortable to wear; he’d gotten used to it quite quickly, but his foot does feel lighter, more mobile. He kicks into the air a couple of times. An old urge comes to him, to sneak off into the middle of the night to the gym and kick the hell out of a dummy. That gym is half a galaxy away now. Better to ignore the desire and crawl under his covers. Tomorrow he’ll find out about the kittens and get a new tracker, hopefully, for Betton’s sake, without Leia being any the wiser about his night spent unsupervised. He also hopes, as he has for weeks, that Rey returns tomorrow.

  
  
  


War may be hell, but peace is so dull. Unless they’re planetside or shuttled to another ship, they never have any patients. They have no one to treat on board because no one is getting injured in skirmishes with the First Order. Everything is different now; the stakes are lower and the minutes of tedium drag on. Finn’s got his chin on his folded knuckles. With his other hand, he taps a soft beat with a scalpel on a glass petri dish. There were times during the past year that he had wanted things to calm down but he hadn’t wanted them to come screeching to a halt either.

Trauri leans on the opposite side of the counter, mirroring his chin on hand position and his pout. “Finn, former Stormtrooper of the First Order, slight Force Sensitive, and dedicated boyfriend to Poe Dameron is bored.”

“Yes, Trauri, galaxy’s best nurse and amateur entomologist, I am very bored. But, as we’ve been over before, not Poe Dameron’s anything-close-to-a-boyfriend. Man, why do people always say that?” 

She shrugs. “People don’t say it anymore, now that you're here and Poe’s on the frontlines.”

“Well that’s something at least,” he says.

“Now they say you guys broke up.” She gives him a shy smile, knowing that she’s pushing his buttons, and he shoots her what he feels is an adequate glare. 

He misses Poe. Like, a lot. What he hasn’t missed is taking flak for Poe’s flirtatious nature. The man has no off-switch. He would bat his long dark eyelashes at anything sentient. The only reason it got directed so often at Finn was because they spent every waking non-combat moment together. If people knew just how provocative the pilot tended to be, they wouldn’t assume something romantic was going on. It very much wasn’t.

He decides to change the subject.

“You ever think about what’s going to happen to the Resistance?” he asks. “You know, now that there’s nothing to resist.” The First Order is still out there, yeah, but with puppet master Snoke having been skewered on Rey’s lightsaber and Kylo Ren AWOL, they have no teeth anymore. They aren’t the threat that they used to be. Poe and his pilots are liberating worlds faster than the  _ Observer _ can swoop in for recovery. Their half of the Resistance, a large chunk of whom made the switch to the  _ Observer _ , is little more than a relief effort now. Finn had wanted a break from the fighting, the clean-up job that the  _ Raddus _ is performing with the First Order remnants, and he wanted to stay with Rey, so following her over had been a no-brainer. Alebren had stayed on the  _ Raddus _ , so they still have an amplified healer, and no doubt he’s less bored than Finn.

He doesn’t want to jinx things, but he’s nervously waiting for the announcement that the Resistance is dissolving completely, everyone going off to their own causes. 

“Yeah, but a lot of people are wondering that, I think. We’ve already lost the people that were only in this for the adrenaline.” She considers. “Soon there won’t be a need for the resistance.”

“I’ve been thinking that too.”

Whatever cause General Leia moves onto next, that’ll be what Poe rallies behind. Rey will keep hunting for Kylo Ren. And where does that leave Finn? 

The endless options of the galaxy and his potential role in it goes far beyond the realm of intimidating. He’s got useful skills; the time that he’d spent as cannon-fodder for the First Order hadn’t been completely without merit. He can choose from a wide range of jobs and he can do them on any type of planet he can imagine. He can keep security on an ice planet or fly commercial rigs on a planet with buildings tall enough to touch the clouds or heal scrapes for local villagers in the desert. It’s all there, every combination, aswirl in his head. 

He just wants to stay beside Rey and Poe, his slapdash family, but that’s already not an option. The triad they’d formed was a lower priority for them than it is for him. Rey’s got Hux now, as stupid as that is, and Poe’s a pilot for life, is always going to go where the action is, to where he’s needed, and Finn will always take a backseat to that.

“Are you thinking of moving along, now that there’s no fighting?” she asks. 

He’d been reluctant to join in the fighting, and he still doesn’t want to kill people, even bad people, but he does miss being useful. He’d been useful in medical on the  _ Raddus _ before it was all daily stuff like canker sores and burning pee. He wants to be out there doing stuff, moving around. He wishes they hadn’t found out that the Force amplifier makes him able to do medical shit because that just means he was stuck in a white-walled room during the last of the fighting. 

“I think it depends on what Rey and Poe do.”

She nods. “I hear you. I’m lucky that Harvey was just as dedicated to overthrowing the First Order as I was. But then, being married is very different from being friends.”

“They’re all I have,” Finn says then sighs. “I’m bumming myself out. I’m going to go check on the kitten again.”

She calls to him as he leaves for the lab, “I just did.”

“Don’t care!” he shouts back. He needs to stare at something cute and furry to pull himself out of his funk. 

  
  


There is nothing wrong with the lungs of the one surviving kitten. She’s on her back legs, front feet pressed up against the glass of the incubator, and she is wailing out her rendition of his favorite aria from  _ The Brief Reign of Future Wraiths _ . Hux swears he can hear some of the same notes, the same vibrato. They’ve cleaned her up, but her fur is still ragged, not one uniform length or spacing, like Rey’s hair, and she’s quite orange with the exception of her nose, rose-petal pink, and a ring of black around her eyes, like makeup. Her tongue has little barbs on it, and they look more dangerous than the tiny slivers she has for teeth. She’s very skinny, especially her neck which looks as though it shouldn’t be able to maintain the weight of her large head.

“I’ve never seen you smile like that,” says Ginevra.

Hux hadn’t even known he was, but he straightens his face as quickly as possible into its usual flat expression. He wonders how silly he must have looked and regrets his skin coloring which no doubt shows his flustered embarrassment. He’d lost himself in the thing’s cuteness. 

“Sorry. My observation wasn’t meant to deter it,” she says.

“She’s very loud,” he notes. “Does she know that the others are dead?” asks Hux. He taps with his finger on the glass and the kitten’s front foot follows it. She’s alert. Ginevra says that she is going to make it, and Hux believes it. She’s a fighter.

The doctor is out of her uniform, and he suspects that she’s not actually on duty, but just there to answer questions for him. Yet another person on this ship with too damn big of a heart. Sometimes he feels like the only mean one on board. 

She leans over the counter, hands reaching out to snatch up some medical supplies which had been left out. “She knows. But, that isn’t why she’s meowing so loudly.”

Meowing. Hux doesn’t know this word, but then, he’s never seen a kitten before yesterday. Kittens meow and come in litters. He’ll have to check his datapad for information on these animals so that he isn’t left out and ignorant. 

“She wants out of that damn box,” says Ginevra. She inserts a utensil into a sanitizing device and puts on a glove. “Kittens need to roam around and destroy.”

Sounds familiar. “Destroy?” he asks. Her entire litter had fit into his pocket; how much destruction could she cause? “Do kittens get very large?”

She laughs. “Have you never been around cats?” 

Hux shakes his head. “I’ve met a Zygerrian once; I’ve heard them referred to as cat people, and I see the similarities.”

“I had a great grandmama with six cats not unlike this one, so I’m pretty well-acquainted. She’ll grow to be about this big, much smaller than, say, a Gurrcat or a Tuskcat. They have a lot of energy when they’re babies and enjoy hunting. As they get older, they get lazy. All of my grandmama’s cats got fat and were more interested in lying in the sun than chasing small rodents.” The sanitizer finishes its cycle and Ginevra pops it out with her gloved hand, putting it back to where it belongs in a drawer. “I’ll find something for you to feed her and jot down the amounts and feeding times, just so that doesn’t happen.”

“Wait! Why would I be feeding her?”

“Because she’s your pet now.” She continues speaking as though she hadn’t just made this pronouncement. “She’ll be on liquids for only a little while. Pity the mother couldn’t be saved too, so she could get milk directly from the source.”

Hux is positively flummoxed. He just wanted to check to see if the animal was alive. He had no intention of putting himself in charge of her care. “I don’t think so.”

She takes off the glove. “Well, she can’t live in medbay and the General’s not going to double back to Akiva to return it. You’re stuck, Armitage. You’re a pet owner now.”

Silly to experience panic over such a literal small thing, but it’s there in his stomach anyway. He has no idea how to take care of another living being. He’s never even kept a plant. 

Ginevra touches his upper arm. “It’s okay,” she says, in a firm but caring doctorly voice. “They’re resilient animals that require very little maintenance. I’ll find you some reading material about them and, if you get overwhelmed, just ask Rey. She seems… nurturing.”

He knows that Rey hasn’t had a pet either, unless one counted BB8, which Hux does not, as it’s not biological and technically only temporarily in the possession of Rey, Poe having lent her the machine with the stipulation that it was to be returned as soon as Kylo Ren was found. Also, he has no idea when she’ll return. It’s already been eighteen days since she set out for the Pakuuni system, a length of time of which he’s acutely aware. 

“We’ll keep her for another day or two, make sure she’s properly hydrated, and just in case we missed something, but then you can take her back to your quarters.”

He leans down to the incubator. The kitten sings louder to him with his attention back on her, but the meows haven’t stopped since he’s been here. His own pet. It’s as unexpected as anything else these days; he’d prefer life to stop surprising him. 

  
  
  


Once again Rey has failed to produce Kylo Ren (It seems like he’s opened a pocket of space and folded himself into it), but unlike the past times, she can’t consider the time wasted, not with what she thinks she’s bringing back to Leia. After twenty-two days away, she is more than ready to be back on the  _ Observer _ . She’s a citizen of everywhere and nowhere at once because the role that she played in the destruction of Starkiller Base and the assassination of Supreme Leader Snoke has made her a hero to nearly every planet, but she lacks a true connection to any of them. Her only connection is to the handful of people to whom she’s returning. 

She detects Leia first, unsurprising since her master is the strongest in the Force currently on board. She reaches out with her mind rather than her comm-link to announce her arrival and senses that her master is asleep. Rey’s lost track of time; with no regular ship rotations or sunlight to gauge, she hadn’t even realized that she’s returning when everyone else is asleep. She decides to wait until morning since the temptation to rouse Leia is slight and easily defeated. She’d rather check in first with the next person she feels on the  _ Observer _ . 

Hux’s aura has changed since she’d first felt it in the medbay so long ago. Back then, he’d been in a stranglehold, everything he was suffocating beneath the coils of expectations and dogma. Now he feels roomier within the binds, because, while there are still a few clinging too tightly, he’s managed to cut others completely. He’s growing. That core of his essence, the part of him that Prylar Enzo had identified as his primary heart, is alive and thrumming with purpose. He’s pursuing his own mission, not his father’s (may that man’s memory be lost to history), not his evil army’s, but his own, and there’s so much that he wants to do now. 

The man he’s becoming has been there all along; she’d glimpsed it under his mask before anyone else, including Hux, had. When he breaks the shackles of his past for good, he’ll be magnificent: intelligence, determination, and compassion unfettered by the irrational need to be perceived as cold and apathetic (remnants of Brendol’s influence) and unhampered by the defensive barrier of cynicism and distrust. He’s already wonderful, and so completely different from anyone she’s ever met. Everything is a strategy for him, his thoughts three steps ahead of her naturally. He takes in the world around him with keen analysis, as though the galaxy is a game of Dejarik. Despite this cleverness, he never lets his ego stand in the way of getting things done. He listens when people correct him, eager to excel with their feedback if he finds it useful. She’s sat in on three sessions with him and his therapist, and she’s seen how he has created a plan of attack to rid himself of his trauma, and then watched as he altered it at Marshall’s suggestion, accepting the professional opinion above his own instincts.

He’s asleep, and if she tries hard enough, she could see his dreams. She’s done it before, meddled too, tweaking his thoughts to more pleasant ones when he’s having a nightmare. They almost always involve Kylo Ren or his father, and they’re almost always violent. She’s seen enough during their memory swap and through brief unguarded moments of connection to know that many aren’t so much nightmares as memories. Part of her, a dark part, wishes that Brendol Hux had been by Snoke’s side when she’d slain him. Two very dark birds with one stone. She doesn’t often fantasize about violence, certainly, it’s not the Jedi way, but when she thinks about little Armitage being told that he’s weak over and over again, being physically hurt by the man who is supposed to love him the most, she can’t maintain a peaceful mindset. 

One of the other parts of her heart is also sleeping. Finn sleeps lightly, the quiet too quiet after having slept so many years with his batch snoring and shuffling, talking and squabbling. Normally she’d check in with Poe too, who doesn’t so much sleep as die for 4-6 hour periods, his brain finally being permitted to disconnect. Without him being on board, her return feels incomplete. She knows that Finn feels similarly, that it’s harder for him with the strength of their connection. Finn and Poe are some of the bravest people she’s ever met, and the most selfless; if Poe wasn’t, he wouldn’t be risking his life on the frontlines, would selfishly adhere himself to the man he not so secretly loves and never let go. 

It’s easier for her and Hux and Finn to be a part of this movement because it has given them somewhere to belong. They aren’t looking forward to the end of the fight as much as the others because they have no families or homes to which they’ll return. The  _ Observer _ is a temporary home and her fight against Kylo Ren is a temporary mission. 

  
  
  


“Hux… Hux…” the words are spoken softly, and he flinches only because they’ve woken him up. He can see little more than her silhouette, lights set very low but it’s her, and he’s so very glad in a completely open, appreciative way that she’s come back. He reaches up a hand, traces up her neck and behind her ear, cradling the back of her head, and pulling her down to feel the pleasant pressure of her forehead against his own before kissing her.

“I’ve missed you, Scavenger.” Sentimental words that come easily because he’s still partially asleep, isn’t even really sure this isn’t just a very nice dream. 

“Hux… I’ve missed you too, but there’s something in your quarters, an animal.” 

Brain fuzzy as to the details, but alertness triggering at her worry, he tries to parse out what she’s saying. An animal in his quarters? When he realizes who she means, he laughs. 

“I was hoping to surprise you.” He sits up and rubs at his eyes. Rey is on her knees on the bed beside him. Rather than have her move, he shimmies out from under his blanket on the wall side of the bed. He gracelessly crosses its length and stands, trying to shake off the sleep. He presses on the mechanism by the door, raising the lights a touch more. “Where did she go?”

Rey’s mouth tweaks upward at his pronoun use, tipping his hand that it’s no random rodent that wandered onto the ship only to take up residence in Hux’s room. She points to the fresher. Of course. He finds the tiny tuft of trembling orange fur in the crevice between the sink and the fresher. When he reaches out to grab her, she scoots back further, forcing him to lie on the floor in order to grab her. She hisses, but it isn’t menacing, not when he can fit her entire body in his hand.

Rey’s under the covers when he returns, her back against the wall, and smiling at him, eager to make the acquaintance of the random animal she’d detected, probably through the force, upon her arrival. He sits next to her, pressing one full arm against hers, and opens his hands slightly, kitten firmly in place, but more visible.

“Rey, I’d like you to meet Millicent.” 

“Oh!” she squeals. Millicent growls, the ungrateful thing not recognizing a person that is sure to spoil her as much or worse than Hux. “Oh, Hux! She has your hair!”

Hux glares. ‘I do not have orange hair!” he says rigidly. The kitten wiggles and claws, and he gives up trying to hold her after one tiny claw lands a particularly good swipe at the skin under his nail. She tears off into the fresher again. He looks down at his attacked yet uninjured hands, and back up at Rey. “Though I will admit, there might be some similarities in temperament.”

Rey laughs, tilting her head to lean on his shoulder. “She’s adorable. But, how did you find a kitten on a starship?” 

He runs his fingers through her hair. It's growing back, short yet frizzy in all directions like a dandelion before its petals are blown off by the wind. It’s more silly than attractive but he’d take that over Finn’s knitted cap any day. Sometimes she tames it with a long delicate cloth wrapped several times as he’s seen desert-dwelling peoples do. Poe had sometimes lent her an old flying cap, and she’d looked adorably like a child playing dress-up.

He’s so glad she’s back. It’s the longest she’s been gone yet. 

“Oh, she’s a stray I found on Akiva. She will fit in nicely with the rest of us orphans, once she realizes that she doesn’t need to defend herself.” Rey doesn’t like to think of herself as an orphan. She wants to believe it’s just a matter of time before her parents appear, ending the galaxy’s longest and saddest game of hide-and-seek.

“Similar temperament,” says Rey, teasing.

He’s working on that, but the Death Star wasn’t built in a day. It scares him how much progress he’s made in lowering his defenses. It’s dangerous. He doesn’t need Rey’s acknowledgment of his growth, but the teasing sits less comfortably than he’d like. Anyway, he doesn’t want to tell her the story of finding the kittens in the lightning-lit warehouse. He doesn’t want to talk at all. He’s been stuck with only his brain for weeks, evaluating responses for subconscious motivations, journaling his nightmares, and expressing his feelings when he can bring himself to. He wants to lose himself in everything Rey is. Her brain is better: brighter and more hopeful.

He lies down, fingers pulling gently on her elbow, silently requesting that she lie down with him. She does, curling with practiced ease into the nook of his armpit as his legs fight with the blankets. He would never have suspected a hidden cuddler inside of himself, but when they lie like this, she feels like an extension of himself, abused child and abandoned child uniting.

They enwrap each other completely, physically and emotionally, trying to fill the space they’d had between them for too long. Everything they’ve done in the past three weeks tangles together. She’d found a Sith cave and traded with pirates and read a boring book without asking BB8 a single word definition and brought Leia ancient artifacts. He’d found three tiny kittens and allowed Betton to trick him into getting drunk and accidentally triggered the alarm on his ankle tracker and missed Rey so much that parts of his soul felt frostbitten. 

Their emotions are so entwined that it’s hard to identify whose thread is what part of the braid. His pride in rescuing the kittens is her pride in him and her worry about the Sith cave is his, all knotted up, identities forfeited to the bond. He feels her love, a warm ball of security and appreciation that has expanded over these many months and continues to grow. He bathes in the acceptance and affection as though it were a liquid, and she does as well with what he offers. His love is spoken in implications and quotations masked behind poetry and comments that could be taken two ways. She understands regardless; it isn’t as though he could hide anything from her here in the mental space created by her Force attunement. She knows who he is down to the individual cells in his body and her choice to hold him tight even after seeing the darkness that he’s still trying to scrape out of himself evaporates more of his self-doubts, burns away more of the icicles the First Order had made in his heart. 

She is his light. He wants to tell her so, but the vulnerability keeps his lips tightly together. His mind already has, and even knowing this, he can’t give it voice. Instead, he kisses the top of her head and basks in the light of her presence. “I’m glad you’re back,” he whispers, trying not to cringe at his obvious dependency.

  
  
  


In the morning, Finn waits for her outside of Hux’s quarters, stubbornly unwilling to just come inside like a mature adult. She toys with the idea of making him wait out there for her, but she can hardly punish his childish actions with some of her own. When she emerges, BB8 trailing behind her, he tosses himself into her arms. Rather than be bowled over by him, she returns his physical affection with all the ferocity of three long weeks apart and the enthusiasm that comes with that reunion.

“You come back, you should tell people!” complains Finn.

“Just last night! Would you rather I woke you?”

“Yeah, yeah I would. It’d be eight less hours of worrying about you.” He releases her and ruffles her hair. She’s going to be very glad once it’s back to its normal length, or at least long enough to not be so fluffy that it encourages others to pet her like an animal. “But, you’re back, and not injured, so I’ll cut you some slack.”

They walk. “I almost woke Leia. I’m so excited with what I’ve found.”

“That’s what you said… mind said…” he corrects. 

Perhaps it’s because she’s so adept, but it seems odd how Finn can’t adjust to interacting with the Force. She’d taken to it like a Nightwatcher Worm to freshly upturned silt. Her powers make up for his lacking ones, and it’s easier for them to go back and forth mentally than it is for other non-Force sensitive individuals, except for Hux who somehow has remained bonded to her, despite not having any natural proficiency with the Force. She can sense him still now, encouraging the kitten to have breakfast.

“That’s what I’m going to see her about now,” she says, lifting the bag on her shoulder with a thumb in demonstration. “Would you like to stay and hear about it?”

“Yeah, sure. This isn’t, like, a high clearance sort of thing?” 

She scrunches her forehead at him. “Why? Do you think she’d leave you out?” 

He raises his arms in a sort of hand shrug. “I don’t know. Everyone just treats me like a nurse, now.”

Rey thinks about that, caught by surprise at the complaint. She shakes her head. “Well, with the war almost over… I suppose Leia has fewer assignments to distribute.”

“Maybe. Poe’s still got plenty to do.”

She stops walking and places a hand on his arm. BB8 nearly rolls into her, its cute curious head looking up to her for an explanation. “You’re wishing you’d joined Poe on the frontline?”

He sighs. “Sometimes, but that’s not really… it’s not just that.”

“I understand,” she says. Her hand grips briefly, like a hug. “I do. I don’t like that we’re apart either and I know that I haven’t been here.”

“I can’t always count on you guys to be around.” He’s moving his weight from foot to foot and avoiding her eyes, not really believing what he’s just said. He’s tossing out bait, waiting to see whether she bites into it or ignores it completely. 

She gets it. They’re used to being ignored and abandoned. Her and Finn and Hux are not very different at all, not when it comes down to it. They all survived the ways that they knew how. Finn learned to follow, to try and blend, to be agreeable to the point where no one had any idea who he was. Now that he’s finding out who he is and putting it out there for the world, he needs reassurance that he’s not going to be tossed aside. “Lots of options,” she says happily, as though it’s a good thing, when, honestly, sometimes it isn’t, especially for a man who isn’t used to having any choice, let alone thousands. “Ones we’ll all make together. I won’t leave you behind, Finn. You mean too much to me. And Poe too. We’ve got a home; we just need to figure out where to put it.”

She doesn’t mention the tears that threaten to fall from his eyes and he doesn’t shed them, but they share the tender moment just a few heartbeats before continuing to Leia’s quarters.

It’s C3PO who gets the door for them, head bending forward awkwardly in a gesture of greeting. BB8 zips inside, rolling alongside R2D2, the bestest of robot pals. In a close human approximation, Rey seeks out her master’s arms, burrowing in as though she weren’t considerably taller than the older woman. She cuddles with Leia, Hux, and Finn, and that is three more people than she ever has before. She feels as though she could never get enough of the sensation of acceptance and love. She has to make up for the lost time, she supposes, and she wonders if she’ll ever feel that she’s caught up.

“Welcome home,” says Leia in her scratchy voice. It’s not true, this being her home, not really, but it feels truer when Leia says it. Leia loves her and she may not be her mother, but it’s close and it’s wonderful.

“Thank you, Leia,” she replies. “It’s good to be back on board.”

“Finn,” acknowledges the General. 

“General,” he says with a nod. 

“So, what have you brought me?” asks Leia, easily done with pleasantries and curious about what’s kept Rey gone for as long as she has been.

Rey pulls the pyramids from her bag. She’d washed them off as best she could on the return flight, and without the dirt, their crystalline surfaces are quite beautiful. She can’t feel anything from them, not a twinge of the Force, and as amazing as they are for what they do, Rey suspects that they are just technological, with no more mysticism involved in their creation than BB8’s. Perhaps after she brings back Ben, she can take them apart and see how they work.

She places them on a long table next to an empty wine glass and a datapad though it creates an odd tableau. The pyramid that she’d marked with a torn-off piece of adhesive, formerly for holding in place the bandages on her head, she sets nearest to her.

When Leia looks at her expectantly, Rey launches into where she’d found them. Neither Leia nor Finn looks pleased about her purchasing coordinates from a pirate, and their faces look even grimmer when she tells them about spelunking through an old Sith place of power. She’s standing right in front of them! Obviously, she made it out unscathed! But, rather than allow Leia the opportunity to chide her (though her master doesn’t often do so, holding back for fear of driving her somewhat adopted daughter away), she allows her enthusiasm to drive her words without hesitation. “And, this is what they do,” she says.

The little lights are everywhere, turning the general’s quarters into a microcosm of space. The surprising brilliance puts Finn on the defensive, reflexes trained to react to things like laser fire, and his hand moves to his blaster-less hip. “It’s a star map. And I think, I think that…” she seeks out one of the colored dots but not seeing one, she just describes it. “There are red dots scattered throughout. I think it points out Sith places of power, their version of a Jedi temple, like the place I was in.

“Artoo, the red dots. Do any of them correspond to the planet Neilrebmah VII?”

Though she can understand Artoo’s response perfectly, C3PO paraphrases for him in Basic. “He says there are 6 red dots and that one of them is Neilrebmah VII.”

“Six dots…” mumbles Rey. It had been nearly miraculous to have spotted any colored lights at all, with that kind of ratio. Fate wanted to lead her; she gets indications of that truth every day. 

The stars reflect in Leia’s wide eyes. She’s a sharp woman and her mind turns over the ramifications and possibilities quickly. She’s a strategist, and Rey doesn’t know if that’s by nature or by too many years fighting in wars. “Kylo Ren might be at one of these locations,” she observes, her voice betraying no emotions.

“Or Ben.” Rey hasn’t given up hope. She’d seen the fear in Kylo Ren when she had killed Snoke. There was a little boy in there, Leia’s little boy, and he’d given all of himself to something that had turned him into a monster. She’d felt his regret and how very lost he felt with his master’s death, and then she’d been distracted by the sound of Snoke crashing off of his throne, and he’d been gone. 

She’d seen Hux redeemed, though that was a much easier turn to make because, despite the body count, Hux had never really embraced the evil with which he armored himself, never grabbed hold of the dark side as Ren did. But it gives her hope that if she’d been able to see the man who fired Starkiller become thoughtful and tender, that all is not lost for Ben Solo.

“Make it stop,” says Leia. For a second, Rey thinks she’s talking about Kylo Ren’s path of destruction, lost as she is in her aspirations, but then she understands the actual request and powers down the pyramid. It seems positively black in the room with space no longer displaying on the walls. Finn’s rubbing at his eyes, trying to bully his vision back to normal. “And the second… is it a copy or…?”

Quick enough in her thinking that Rey doesn’t need to explain, just confirm what she’s already guessed. “Blue dots.” She lights the second pyramid, smattering the room again. “I think they’re Jedi temples. But, I don’t know how they got that information, or why they didn’t use it.” Then, she thinks of Luke Skywalker and his sad place on Ahch-To, and adds, “Or maybe they did.” ‘

She can’t think of Luke without feeling anger and hate, though she’s training to be a Jedi and shouldn’t be holding grudges. His rebuff had mirrored her parents’ and she couldn’t forgive him that moment. She’d nearly walked away for good then. She’d wanted to spit in his face, to find another hole like Jakku and bury herself there where no one could drag her back into a fight that didn’t feel like her own yet. But there had been Leia willing to train her, opening those motherly arms for her, and she’d just lost her husband to their child, and they needed each other. So, she’d stayed, stayed long enough for the Resistance to feel like an extension of what she needed to accomplish, part of her destiny.

“Artoo, is one of the blue dots Ahch-To?”

Artoo responds, and C3PO translates. BB8 swirls in place, robotic excitement on display at the confirmation that while there are seven blue dots, none correspond to Ahch-To.

This surprises Rey. It could be that whomever constructed these devices did not know  _ all _ the Jedi temple locations. It doesn’t rule out her hypothesis.

“Luke was trying to find Jedi temples,” says Leia, sounding hypnotized, lost in a memory that Rey can feel but not read. The longing to hold her brother transfers from Leia to her padawan, a confusing sensation that Rey’s never actually felt. Then, suddenly aware that she’s projecting, Leia curtails her vision, snapping back into general-stance, and obviously coming to the same conclusion as Rey as to what the dots signify. “Artoo, please make a list with coordinates of the locations we just saw, but store it on external. I don’t want this to reach a network. We’ll need to get this information physically to Luke. It could be useful.”

“I can take it.” Rey had nearly forgotten Finn was there. His voice and what he’s offering to do surprises her. Then, she realizes it’s the best possible thing for him right now since he’s felt so restless lately. 

_ He needs a mission _ , Rey thinks to Leia, not believing the general would have any opposition to his going anyway. 

There’s a regal quality to Leia, especially when doling out assignments, so it’s little surprise that when she says, “Yes, Finn. You should take this information to my brother,” Finn lights up like he’s being knighted. To hide her smile, Rey gathers up the pyramids and puts them into her bag. She could leave them with Leia. Now that BB8 has the images in its memory, the devices themselves are superfluous. She wants them with her, her maps to Kylo Ren, to the end of all of this conflict. It may be superstitious, but she won’t climb back into the  _ Falcon _ without them. 

  
  
  


“It’s nothing, a drop in a barrel,” says Hux. He gestures down to their plates. “We might as well try to portion these plates off to the entire complement of the ship.”

There are times that Rey wonders whether it’s about helping people or getting the organization up to maximum efficiency for Hux. In the end, the result is the same. Hundreds of thousands have Hux’s influence and efforts to thank for a marked improvement in their lives regardless of his motivations. She’ll write him off as selfish one day and then see him as astoundingly benevolent another. His heart is a maze with hidden corners, everything tucked away with no clear path through.

Lunch was a good idea. Soon she’ll be eating whatever she’s got stored aboard the  _ Falcon _ , and she hadn’t realized just how hungry she was. She’d cleared through all of the nerf strips and boiled potams, leaving only the unappetizingly mushy red sprouts uneaten on her plate. Hux too has barely touched the red sprouts, though his potams are gone and the yobas nearly so. He avoids the meat as usual, though sometimes, when they’re sharing with a large group, he puts some on his plate just to pass to her when she’s finished hers, often with a teasing comment about her carnivorous inclinations. The meal had been filling, but bland. Since her time spent away from Jakku, she’s developed a fondness for spicy foods, the sort that burns a path down her throat and creates pools of tears in her eyes. She indulges when she can, usually when she’s planetside. 

“We helped. _ You _ helped. Don’t downplay your role. You were the one who negotiated for most of the goods we dropped off.”

“Yes, my innate talent of hustling,” he replies derisively. He raises a hand before she can argue. “No, I know they needed it. I don’t mind being a beggar for the cause. I’m just…” he sighs. It’s hard for him to vocalize his inner feelings, but he’s gotten so much better at it in the last ten months. “It just feels like it’s not enough… not comparatively.”

She reaches a hand across the table to grasp his. “You’re never going to be able to revive a trillion souls,” she reminds him. “You’re making an impact.”

“Why does it seem so much easier to do massive damage than to effect even a bit of positive change?”

It’s rhetorical, she knows, but she still wishes that she had an answer. He’s not wrong. The destruction that the First Order had wrought seemed so easy, stormtrooper raids here, trade blockades there, whereas cleaning up the mess in the wake of their crumbling reign seems impossible, like relocating grains of desert sand with only tweezers. She’d never have guessed that destroying Snoke would be the easy part of her fate. Well, not easy - she had nearly died, after all, but it was a small part of the uphill battle that she and her friends are waging. 

He squeezes her hand and his eyes, cold to so many others, look warmly and appreciatively at her. “You’re thinking loudly,” he says in a low voice. “I didn’t mean to bring you down into pessimism with me.” 

“I’m not that easily influenced by your moods,” she says.

“And of that, we are all lucky.” He releases her hand, though she’d rather he not. He’d asked her one time after they’d gotten teased for similar gestures if she’d prefer they not be so demonstrative around others, and her bafflement at the idea of concealing such actions had made him laugh. 

He winks at her. “You would be far more tyrannical than I ever was, you bullheaded warrior.” 

Rey's reputation for stubbornness is well-earned, and she just smiles at the taunt. Everyone on board the  _ Observer _ is stubborn, or else they wouldn’t be freedom fighters. It’s an entire ship of people that don’t like being told what they can and can’t do. 

“I wish that it didn’t feel so pointless for you.”

He shakes his head, bangs swaying slightly. He’s been growing it out, way past First Order regulation (the deviance thrills him) and she approves of it as a physical manifestation of his personal growth. Plus, she thinks it’s attractive. She misses his beard and regrets never having gotten to kiss him with it. “It only feels pointless some days. When I’m on-site, it feels useful. We just need to think larger, get to the roots instead of trimming the branches.”

“Well, you’re good at that, and Leia will listen if she thinks you have a point.”

“She already has. She’s foolish to have enacted as many of my ideas as she has.” He says this last part lower, not wanting someone overhearing to take him literally. There are still a few that suspect him of being a double agent, but overall, the pushback to his participation has been surprisingly minimal. “There’s a line, my friend, one that I need you to make sure I don’t cross.”

The honesty in his eyes makes her stomach squirm. She’d never have thought back then on that downed ship that she could so completely trust a person like Hux, but here he is wanting so badly to do the right thing, not sure where his power-hungry nature ends and true benevolence begins, looking to her for guidance. “I understand,” she says. “We’ll both keep an eye on each other.” She taps her foot against his under the table. “And, you can bet that Finn will be watching as well.”

Hux rolls his eyes. 

She’s going to miss him, but he has no place on this hunt for Kylo Ren. She worries that she’ll lose him if she succeeds in bringing Ben Solo back to his mother. She can only control what she does. She’ll try her hardest and deal with the consequences of whatever Ben decides when he does. It’s easy for Rey to worry more about the present than the future; she has had years of experience at that - where she’ll find food, how she’ll keep safe. “Betton too,” she adds. “So, tell me more about this drinking that he roped you into.”


	2. Chapter 2

Ru’offhur

Grass, low to the ground as though landscaped but dry and brittle, is all Rey knows for three days. She’d set the _Millenium_ _Falcon_ down at random, hoping that intuition or luck would guide her. Somehow, despite her search being reduced from galactic to planetary scale, it still feels like she’s trying to find a glass bead in a desert. It all looks the same and, if she didn’t have equipment to tell her otherwise, she’d think she’d been taking the speeder in circles.

On day one she discovers many different kinds of animals, most the same brownish orange hue of the grass. They flee from the movement of the speeder and watch her with untrusting eyes when she makes camp, their strangely thin bodies alert for any loud sound or quick movement from her. Day two is more grass and plucking the blades from where BB8’s body meets its head. She gets overzealous with her campfire, which she’s wanted more for comfort than warmth since the temperature has yet to drop below 20 degrees, and nearly sets the planet ablaze. She uses her bedroll to stamp out the potential brushfire, and while she’s glad for her quick reflexes in the matter, the overwhelming reek of smoke in the fabric makes it hard to sleep.

On day three she finds the tree. Despite exhausting herself casting out Force feelers day after day, she spots it with her eyes first. It begins as a speck on the horizon, noteworthy because it’s something that isn’t yellow grass. It grows impressively as the distance between it and the speeder decreases. She’s seen larger trees, some on Takodana, the first trees she’d ever seen in person, but it’s still huge and completely incongruous with the sad vegetation that surrounds it. It looms intimidatingly ahead of her, reminding her of old holovids of Darth Vader, and she welcomes the sensation of her neck hair rising in high alert.

The life force of the tree is not the only dark presence she senses and she slows her speeder before reaching the tree, eyes seeking out what her Force instinct is telling her. The change in speed is all the signal that the person she’s detected needs. A plasma bolt hits the front of the speeder somersaulting it over and over before it crashes nose-first into the ground. She’d felt the surge of rage before the shot, the intent behind the collision of energy with metal, but her reflexes hadn’t been quick enough to do anything about it. 

She’s disoriented only a moment, staring down at the smoke from where the speeder was hit, the dirt having muffled the flames, like her bedroll the other night.  “BB8!” she cries, whirling behind her, or above her as they are now situated. He’s there, still strapped into the half-open cargo compartment, unscathed, and beeping in frantic confusion. She checks her own body, feeling remarkably unbattered herself, only some pain from her inner thighs which had squeezed hard to keep on the vehicle and lightheadedness from the flip. An inner voice cries to her about how she could have gotten another concussion, but she summons her best Hux attitude and smothers it - someone is trying to kill her and hypotheticals can wait. 

“Stay here,” she commands. “And be quiet.”

It’s less about jumping down onto the ground than falling gracefully. Now that she’s out of the speeder’s smoke plume, she looks in the direction of the tree. Her attacker hasn’t been sitting idle while she’d been checking on BB8; she sees a black figure walking from the tree to where they are. She’s got her lightsaber on her as always, but he’s still roughly 200 meters from her, so she reaches into the tight white wrappings of her leg and pulls out the blaster that Finn had insisted she take. She’s had barely any time to practice sharpshooting, but she’s had some. It would be smart to use the speeder as a shield while shooting, but she doesn’t want to put BB8 in harm’s way. She steps out from the downed speeder just in case. 

Now that he’s away from the tree, she can better feel the raw hatred and violence emanating from him, his Force aura so imbued with the dark side that he’s like a blight amid the low grasslands; it’s astounding (and unfortunate) that she hadn’t picked him up earlier. She recognizes the figure from her vision on Takodana, maybe not him specifically, but the all-black outfit and the way he feels, like the word threat brought to life. He’s one of Ren’s knights. The memory of the fear she’d experienced during that vision is enough to elevate her own and it mixes with the adrenaline of having her speeder shot out from under her. 

She aims. When he’d shot at her, it had been from well over 300 meters, much farther than her little standard blaster can fire. He might be beyond its range now, but she’s not running short on energy, so she might as well try. Worst case scenario, maybe she can deter him. She swallows hard and fires. With reflexes faster than she can even witness, the knight dips to the side, easily avoiding the blast. Her second shot is met with the same effortless evasion. Her third goes the same. It’s like trying to shoot a zagging fly from the air. Even while dodging every blast of her next volley, he progresses, getting closer to her and her downed speeder. 

He’s less than 40 meters away when she gives up on the blaster, tucking it back away, and opting for her lightsaber instead. She doesn’t want him too close to the speeder, doesn’t want him to hurt BB8 or to destroy her water and rations; she intends to win this fight and she still has to get back to the  _ Falcon _ after she does. 

His helmet has a screen across the mouth and protrusions on the sides blocking out his peripheral vision. She wishes she was in his blind spot, but instead, she’s all that he’s focusing on, his long strides bringing him closer to melee range. He holds his rifle, a dark modified monstrosity, by his thigh, and she doesn’t understand why he isn’t firing at her, surpassing her pathetic attempt to hit him with her blaster. She keeps waiting for him to raise it, but instead, when he draws just near enough that she’s about to attack, he reaches into his ridged coat. 

She hesitates, unsure if she should attack now, while his hand is otherwise occupied, but she’s curious and her delay is only a second. He pulls something from the coat and tosses it to the grass in front of her feet. 

She grips her lightsaber with white-knuckled intensity but spares a glance down to see restraints. She doesn’t comprehend at first, and even before she hears the click of what he’s asking, for her to cooperate with becoming his prisoner, she yells, “No.”

Then the rifle does come up and she moves towards him with the saber only to feel the impact of something hitting her leg. It hurts. She remembers, or imagines remembering, the wall of Hux’s ship colliding with her head, quick, unstoppable. That’s what the blast from the gun feels like. She stumbles back and down, one knee hitting the ground hard, lightsaber still in her hand, its blade making zap sounds as it cuts into the grass. 

She’s been shot. 

The reality of it stuns her. The knight shot her and he’s waiting for her to comply. The restraints, round and metal, are still directly in front of her. He wants to capture her, like Hux’s lackeys had done, like Kylo Ren had done, take her back to his ship like he’s bringing home a sack stuffed with wild bloggin for dinner. She hasn’t spent all this time training with Leia for nothing. She’s no one’s dinner, and she is done with being abducted. 

With the Force, she hurls the restraints at his helmet as she rises from the ground, all her weight on the good leg, and charges at him with her lightsaber. The element of surprise would be better, hence the distraction of the cuffs, but she can’t help the cry that comes from her, the anger and the pain powering the growl in her throat. He easily bats them away with his mind, and his free hand goes to a knife at his belt that had been hidden by his coat. It’s not something he can wield against her lightsaber and she swings at him confidently, but the way he’d been able to dodge her blaster bolts had not been a fluke; he jumps easily out of its way and ducks low, the wicked curve of his blade aiming low on her belly. She flips her saber, aiming to block the weapon, and if the contact had been made, it would have melted through the metal. She can’t rely on what-ifs, because he has the knife pulled back close to himself before she can connect, and she has to think ahead not behind.

She tries a direct thrust instead, not her preferred method of attack, but it makes him work harder to evade, his body having to retreat without any other method of defense. Or so she thinks. She’s putting so much thought into the physical aspect of the fight, that she’s not looking around her, and she doesn’t expect it when a detached part of the downed speeder collides with her side, nearly knocking her over. She manages to stay upright, which given the state of her leg is a small miracle unto itself, but she’s getting used to those. He again comes in low with his knife, lower this time, and she thinks he’s trying for her bad leg, but her instincts draw her focus on protecting that injured part, and she bends her knees, swinging the lightsaber straight across, very nearly connecting with his helmet.

When he retreats, she expands her awareness, not wanting to get caught by any more flying metal. She feels the tree. An observation that lasts an eighth of a second flashes through her mind: the tree is watching the fight. Then, she’s mirroring his steps, trying to anticipate where the next strike will be. He’s doing the same thing, waiting for her attention to divide, perhaps a moment wasted while feeling the throbbing pain in her leg, but she doesn’t falter. She’s still feeling the anger and there’s a clarity to it. She wants more than to stop him; she wants him dead, and that thirst is quieting all other sensations. 

When he picks up the restraints, she feels it before she sees it, and she pushes back on them. He makes another dive for her, but he’s only given her more impetus to end him. She throws herself into him rather than away, twisting her body, and she feels the angled curve of his knife stick her hip at the same time that she feels the smooth glide of her own blade pierce through the woven black cloth covering his throat just under the vocoder. It warps the sound that he makes, an exclamation of pain and a release of trapped air. She cries out as well, feeling the knife go deeper than she’d anticipated, and they stagger, her holding her hand to the wound at her hip, and him to the grass beneath him. 

She feels when he dies, and the triumph at his death tastes as bitter as the anger had. Part of her is repulsed by the pleasure she had experienced; most of her is worried about her wound. She powers off her saber and limps to the speeder.

BB8 greets her happily. The first aid kit can’t do much for her. She’s been shot and stabbed, and she’s at least two days' ride from the  _ Falcon _ . Still, she bandages herself up, and contrary to the droid’s recommendation, Rey sets off to investigate the Sith site, the reason for all this trouble.

  
  
  


“You’re even stiffer than usual.”

Hux has resisted getting to know General Leia, which given the frequency of their meetings (twice, sometimes thrice, a week) and their common bond of Rey, has proven difficult. Also, as he’d confessed to Marshall, they might be working on his severe daddy issues, but the ones surrounding his mother are not much better. He knows that Rey looks to Leia as a mother that she didn’t have; Hux has commanded himself not to do the same. He already owes her his life and already respects her from what he knows of her participation in the Empire and First Order Resistances. It’s a dangerous path to tread, then, in responding to her observation. 

His therapy has taken him through the deep caverns of his fears and doubts, his coping and defense mechanisms, and he works outside of those visits with just as much eager introspection and desire for betterment. His reflex is to scoff at her. What does it matter if he’s tenser? It won’t affect his performance. But Leia isn’t asking about him because he’s less efficient; she’s asking because she sees him as a person, a person who sleeps terribly when Rey is away. He doesn’t want to write off others’ concerns as frivolous anymore, and pretending that he didn’t have feelings hadn’t made them go away. 

Their conversation is semi-private, occurring on the bridge, but off to a side, and he’s never known Leia to speak with a loud voice. He does not doubt that in her younger years, especially in dealings with her late husband, she could probably unleash quite the yell. But that was a lifetime of loss ago, and now she speaks in low, tired tones. 

“I imagine so,” he says, vaguely. He picks up the datapad that he’d set before her. He has more suggestions, fundraising opportunities mostly, and a request that he be allowed to initiate diplomatic negotiations on Vardos, a planet seen as an Imperial utopia with its strict adherence to regulation and its Imperial prep school, once the Resistance undergoes rebranding. He’s had some suggestions for the rebranding as well, but those have been fewer in number as he doesn’t want to press his luck with the percentage of her ear Leia will lend him. He’s not even sure that she’ll be involved in that project; surely 35 years of devoted service to overthrowing totalitarian regimes is sufficient to earn her a retirement. “It’s been...difficult... sleeping.”

“She’s been searching for a while,” says Leia, as though nothing has changed since Rey found that Sith map. He knows she knows better. It was bad enough when Rey was traipsing around the galaxy hoping to stumble upon the most dangerous being in existence using only her newfound faith in fate to guide her, but now she might have a map leading her straight to him. 

“I preferred when she had no particular destinations in mind,” he confesses. 

There are four possible outcomes to her finding Kylo Ren: Rey kills the dark side user, protecting the galaxy, avenging Hux’s torture, and ending any chance of hope that Leia has for the return of her son; Rey “turns” Kylo Ren, endangering everyone by letting the embodiment of narcissistic childish evil on the inside track to the formation of a new government, horrifying Hux, and elating Leia until she’s doubtless struck down by her own son the way her husband had been slain; Kylo manages to turn Rey, harnessing her obscenely powerful Force powers to the destruction of the galaxy; or Kylo Ren killing Rey. Even with how awful the last one is (he can’t even consider a galaxy without her light and love now that he’s experienced it), he finds it the least likely and thus doesn’t waste much of his imagination on it. She is more powerful than any human has the right to be. And, if stubbornness counts for anything, when she’s set to a task, there are none that rival Rey in seeing it through. No, he worries most about the deadly duo that the two Force users could become.

“I understand. It’s easier to be the one risking your life than to be the one standing by and watching a loved one risk theirs.”

Hux swallows hard. It’s true. He can’t do this task for her. His talents lie elsewhere, in scheming and plotting, delegating and commanding. Even after all he’s been through, he doesn’t fantasize about putting a blaster bolt between Kylo Ren’s eyes; he dreams only of a galaxy that’s better than the one into which he was born. It’s more than atonement. He’s gone beyond that desire into something wholly unrealizable. He wants to create a long-lasting peace in the galaxy, where people are happy and free, not bogged down by the indoctrinations of others and the handicaps of trauma. If he’s honest, that’s what he wanted within the First Order, though why he thought an organization that abducted children and raised them as soldiers could accomplish such a goal now eludes him. He’d wanted to just make the galaxy behave, to bend to his sense of order and morality. His aims haven’t completely changed, but they feel better, healthier. 

“Rey will live,” he says firmly. “But the outcome of her search could kill us all.” It sounds alarmist; General Organa seems to take it as such, her eyes narrowing and her head tilting slightly to the side. He hasn’t gotten into this much with her, trying to focus his attention on rehabilitating formerly subjugated planets. He has his job to do and Rey has hers. He hopes their end products coalesce harmoniously. 

  
  
  


There are no whispers this time, but the tree speaks in its own wordless way, with just its presence. When she hobbles underneath its shadow, it’s like pulling Kylo Ren’s cloak over herself. The darkness brings its own emotions to her and layers them upon her shoulders and head. Grief which isn’t hers rests atop her pain and the cooling embers of her anger. 

The trunk looks like it’s been bound by rope that was slowly absorbed into its mass. Its bark is russet brown and deeply segmented, parts having been chipped away by wind or the passage of time. Its leaves are a deep purple, even with the sun hitting from directly overhead. She knows they would look black otherwise. The veins of the leaves on the ground are pure black, giving the impression that pure poison is being pumped up from the roots to make them bloom. 

The tree is both a blight and the largest living thing on the planet. Now she knows why all the grass is so yellowed and low to the ground. This tree takes everything that the planet has to offer for itself. It is greedy like Snoke, like Ren, like Ren’s grandfather before him. It wants to keep all life for itself and it doesn’t care if it snuffs out everyone and everything else to do it. It’s hideous and beautiful simultaneously, and she vacillates between hate and respect as sporadically as her breath.

She’d had a nightmare the night after she’d found the pyramids. She’d been one of the voices trapped in the Sith cave. She’d seen another girl: young, optimistic, and full of the light. She’d wanted to absorb her, to change her, to glut herself on the girl’s promise. She’d gotten out of bed, sweaty and panting. Hux hadn’t woken as she’d gone to splash water on her face, still a novel way to deal with a warm flush. She’d looked into the small shaving mirror there and noticed that she didn’t look as glowing as the other girl had, that there were dark corners in her eyes and the corners of her lips. 

Here she feels dimmed in so many ways by the tree. She wonders, not for the first time, how the Sith manage to get any power from the dark side when all it ever wants to do is to take. The few times she’d tampered with that edge, she’d felt sullied afterward. Drawing from the dark side for protection is like drinking seawater to stay alive.

Climbing the tree is both a bad idea and a necessary action. She’d realized it as she’d looked over the Knight of Ren’s body: he had to have a ship nearby and she just happened to need a ride back to the _Millenium_ _Falcon_ ; she’d never survive the months-long trip back with her supplies. The bark is too brittle for her to climb into the branches and they are too high up for her to just jump and grab one, so she connects into the Force, asking it to lift her to one. The power that comes to her, the leap that becomes levitation, is from that pool of power that flows through all living things, but it feels different. It goes to her head, makes her feel like she’s the powerful one, not the Force. It goes beyond confidence into pride. She feels cocky when her hand touches the first branch, something inside screaming, “It obeys your will.” 

Magnification of dark side abilities. She’d known it and still hadn’t thought it would affect her. She must be careful. 

She loves climbing, misses it during the intervals when she’s trapped on a starship without any access to open uneven terrain. She loves it less now, with the local anesthetic she’d put on her wounds only doing so much to help with the pain. Still, the energy from the tree is feeding into her abilities, and she feels less like a person and more like a monkey, easily ascending to where she has a better view of the landscape once she Force pushes the leaves aside. She bursts them off the tree, damaging it in a dramatic swirl of purple. She sees it, the small black one-person ship the knight had arrived in and she compares it to the direction that BB8 and the downed speeder are. Easy.  _ Everything is easy to a Force user _ , she thinks. 

Even getting down, which should be so hard, isn’t. Though the farther she gets from the tree, the more her own arrogance lessens, and the more the pain, which she’s felt all along, becomes unbearable. By the time she arrives at the speeder, she’s very nearly under her own mental control again. 

BB8 beeps his curiosity.

“It’s just a tree,” she tells him. “A very bad tree.”

  
  
  


Ahch-To

Like the rest of the planet, even the air on Ahch-To is too wet. The clouds are thick and oppressive and though Finn is wearing the waterproof poncho that Rey had suggested he take, it’s more misty than rainy and all it does is bake his body beneath its non-breathable material. He’s reminded of when Poe had talked him into ‘just an hour’ diversion at the hot springs on Carosi XII. Finn had just wanted to focus on their mission, but something about that Dameron eye twinkle always seemed to convince him to take stupid chances. While it wasn’t Poe’s fault that the excursion had cost them a full day evading unexpected pursuers (by posing as bouncers for a shifty gambling club near the springs), Finn blamed him anyway. He hadn’t even enjoyed their time there, the humidity of the place reminding him vaguely but still too much of being locked into his stormtrooper armor for hour upon hour in warm climates.

He wishes Poe were with him now, even with how simple this drop-off will be. Ahch-To isn’t near where Poe’s currently stationed; it isn’t by anything at all, which is probably why the recluse had chosen it. If it was, he could swing by and visit on his way back to the  _ Observer _ . The image of surprising Poe, just turning up on the _ Raddus _ , is amusing. If the pilot hasn’t changed his keycode for his quarters, Finn could just be waiting there for his return, could just be lying on his bed eating, snack crumbles falling from his lips all over the sheets. Poe hated when he ate in bed, said it took him longer to fall asleep with their little jagged edges poking into his skin. Finn had called him a spoiled princess for it even while he hadn’t believed a word of it. He knew that when Poe slept, it was like a barreling train, fast and inevitable

Gloomy though the weather is, Ahch-To’s beauty is undeniable. The sharp cliffs make for some amazing views of the surrounding ocean. The wind carries the scent of saltwater. Other than feeling too sticky, it’s an enjoyable walk from where he’d landed his ship to where Rey had once begged Luke Skywalker to teach her in the ways of the Force. His own infinitesimal Force powers transmit messages that the island is safe, or it might just be intuition; he’s still trying to learn the difference. He has the amplifier on him (he’d been surprised that Leia had let him take it off-ship), but off. He can’t risk sending the last remaining Jedi into a coma by approaching with it active. He’d been so nervous about accidentally doing that, that he’d shut it off before reaching atmosphere. 

He comes upon a collection of buildings, unimpressive rounded piles of stone, and notices a few inhabitants bustling about. Strangely, they ignore him, as though visitors to this remote island on a remote planet are an everyday occurrence. He feels the data chip in one of his pockets nervously and calls to the nearest grey-skinned resident, “Hey, I’m looking for Luke Skywalker.” 

“It’s about time,” says a gruff voice. A cloaked figure emerges from one of the primitive buildings. He’s got a face full of beard and bright keen eyes. “Thought I was going to have to fly myself off this place, and I gotta say, I’d probably be better off flapping my arms than to try and dredge up my only ride here.”

The older man, whom Finn assumes to be Luke, pushes past him, shoulder checking him though there’s plenty of room. “Hey!” he cries out, as Luke sets off in the direction that Finn had just come. “Are you Luke Skywalker?”

“That’s a stupid question,” replies Luke, not bothering to look back or slow his pace. Finn scrambles to catch up in a couple of ways. 

“How did you know I was coming?” he asks, choosing to ask this before asking who Luke intends to fly him anywhere because it sure as shit isn’t him.

“Another stupid question. She’s not recruiting the brightest and the best, is she?” 

Finn glares at the back of the older man. Yeah, he’s got to be Luke Skywalker because he’s just as much of an asshole as Rey made him sound. “Hey, I brought you something… came a long way to do it, too.” Luke seems to know where he’s going; maybe he saw Finn land because, in no time, they’re at the ship. “Do you think I’m taking you somewhere?”

Luke watches him with light-colored eyes that bounce back the grey day. His lower lids are rimmed with red, like a drunkard, but he’s all too lucid. Finn doesn’t trust him; that’s not something he’d expected of General Organa’s brother, even knowing that he’d rejected Rey. It doesn’t help that he’s treating Finn like some kind of errand boy, like a peon meant to do his bidding, like a stormtrooper. “You’re taking me to my beloved sister. I’m done here, and this wacky place we call the galaxy has other ideas for how it wants me to live out my golden years.” 

His voice is so bitter, yet Finn doesn’t see anyone holding a gun to the grumpy old man’s head; if he wants to stay on this island, he’s welcome to. These days, it isn’t often that Finn doesn’t just blurt out the first thing that enters his mind. Hesitating, considering how what he says will be received was something he’d been trained to do, something beaten into him by the scum that had kidnapped him as a child. Now, he allows the free communication from his brain to his mouth, but he doesn’t see Luke’s angle, which alone is cause for caution, but this is also his general’s twin brother, and so he studies the man, carefully choosing his response.

He takes too long, apparently.

“You just gonna stare at me or are we getting out of here?” 

Luckily, Rickman had picked him out a two-person craft. This man is stubborn enough that he probably would have made Finn carry him on his damn lap all the way back to the  _ Observer _ .

It occurs to Finn as he readies for take-off just how pissed Rey’s going to be that the Jedi master is on board. Well, she can take it up with Leia. 

  
  
  


General Leia senses her brother’s presence before the comm lets her know that Finn has brought him back. It’s a peace that she hasn’t felt for some time, but she’d know it anywhere. Before she’d learned how to properly use the Force, it had felt like intuition, like she knew inherently that she could trust this stranger in stormtrooper armor who had brainlessly sought to rescue her. Their bond of blood and magic had been a comforting blanket, like a portable home, and so the revelation that they were twins had been no real revelation at all, just confirmation of something she’d always known in the vaguest of ways. This boy, or man now, was a part of her, and she a part of him. As she slips into a state of homecoming, she senses the relief in him too. It’s been too long.

She barely recognizes him. She’s caught images here and there of the man as perceived by her padawan, but she’d thought it a false vision, a bastardization of how bad he’d looked prompted by the girl’s hatred of the man who had refused to train her in the ways of the Force. Now she sees that Rey’s assessment was only too accurate. His beard is scraggly, his eyes wild (yet as clever as always), and his clothes dirty and plain. He’s like Ben Kenobi if the isolation had turned him mad. He looks like the type of man who yells at trees. 

“Luke,” she says, and her voice may be lower and scratchier, but the affection of the one syllable is still crystal clear and bright. 

They hold each other tight, ignoring the eyes upon them - or at least Leia does; she’s never stepped out of the limelight as he has. She pulls her nose up from his robes; it’s not a pleasant odor. 

“I’m glad you’re happy to see me,” he says, guilt in his eyes when they catch hers.

As though she could blame him for what happened. No, she only blames him for leaving. The seduction of her child to the dark side had been no one’s fault but Snoke’s, though all three (her, Han, and Luke) felt the guilt anyway, rational or not. “Of course,” she says simply, unwilling to get into that right here and now in a hangar bay. She looks at Finn. “I hope he wasn’t too much trouble on the trip back.”

Finn makes a face but allows it to relax to a more neutral expression. “Didn’t know I’d have a passenger.”

“Yes, that caught me by surprise as well.” She looks to her brother for an explanation, but he doesn’t appear to be paying attention, looking around instead at the ship and the small smattering of Resistance members feigning preoccupation with various tasks. He’s been alone too long; he seems out of his element here. She detects an uneasy overwhelm in him, as though this nearly empty bay is too much stimulation. “Well, thank you for bringing him to us. I…” she second-guesses herself, feeling the same restless spirit in Finn she had when she’d assigned him to deliver the data to Luke. “I think there’s a message that I need to get to Poe if you’re interested in taking a mission on the frontlines.”

Finn’s eyes widen at the mention of his beloved friend and it gladdens her heart. “Yeah, of course. Yeah, I can do that.”  
“Good. I’ll get the information to you tomorrow.” She inclines her head slightly to dismiss him, and he springs off, youthful and excited. Her stroll with her brother to the quarters in which he’ll be lodging is less exuberant. The extra weight she’s carrying exacerbates the aching of her joints and some of the old injuries she’d sustained during her more active freedom fighting days. She keeps a hand on Luke’s robed arm as they walk. 

Leia’s life, like so many others, has had its ups and downs; she was unfortunate to have most of the downs arrive one wallop-packing punch after another. First, she’d lost Ben to the dark side, and then Luke had disappeared, and the rift between her and Han had become insurmountable. She’d had time to deal with the absences, and she’d rallied her strength, just as she’s always done, to fight the war alone, before having to deal with Han’s death and Ben’s ultimate betrayal. She doesn’t yet know what it means that Luke is here with her. As good as it feels to have her palm pressed to the scratchy fabric, she worries that it’s an omen. She is uncertain what finally stirred him to participate.

Ben is older than she was when she carried him, and she remembers how justified she’d felt in every action she’d taken to stop the Empire when she was his age. She’d felt that it was her time, her battle, her galaxy, to an extent. Oh, not in the way her father had felt it, but still in a selfish way. She and Luke are on the periphery of the battle now. It’s the fresh-faced new freedom fighters turn. Her doe-eyed overly emotional son has fashioned himself a new Vader and it’s Rey who is out there seeking to turn him, not her jaded sullen brother. Time moves in repeating loops. How close are her and Luke to being out of the cycle for good?

“Your thoughts are gloomier than mine,” Luke says.

She smiles. With him, she doesn’t need to shield her feelings, doesn’t need to keep an artificial distance as she does with her padawan. Luke is a part of her, inseparable no matter how long they’ve spent apart. “I’m practicing resignation. How am I doing?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “You’ve got your thumbs in too many pies for that.” 

Leia doesn’t have to accept her exile from the cycle gracefully. Besides, she still has something to give. As long as she’s alive, she will make an impact. That’s just her way. It used to be Luke’s way as well. Now… well, now she’ll see who her brother is, and what he feels is worth fighting for.

  
  
  


Finn’s just putting his satchel into the tiny craft he’d been assigned (a one-seater - so no chauffeuring grumpy old Jedi against his will this time) when Rey Force-messages him. The timing is perfect, he thinks. He can gather up any well-wishes she has for Poe and say goodbye, maybe spare a few extra minutes of catching up on her search before he departs. That isn’t how things turn out. She arrives on board the  _ Observer  _ with a face white as a sheet and clothing reddish-brown with dried blood. 

“What happened to you?” he cries in a high-pitched tone, pulling her arm over his shoulder to help support her. “Kriff!” 

“Shot and stabbed,” Rey says, in a matter-of-fact way. “Just get me to medical.” 

He pulls out a portable comm unit and starts to request a gurney, but she slaps at the electronic device. “I can walk, Finn. It’s quicker to just go.” Stubborn even while looking like she’s going to faint. He doesn’t know why this still surprises him. He does expect the formerly genocidal tyrant that meets them at the doorway to the medbay, but his presence is like that, annoying and inconvenient. As Finn always does, he ignores him, half-carrying Rey to Dr. Boccaree. It’s infinitely satisfying when the doctor asks Hux to wait outside. Finn smiles childishly at him as he relinquishes his grip on Rey’s hand and leaves. It’s petty but who cares? For once Rey is too busy trying not to hurl or pass out to get angry with him for slighting her boyfriend.

It isn’t long before Dr. Boccaree comes up with a prognosis. “She’s going to need an artificial patella,” She pushes at the tissue with the dull end of a scalpel while studying the live-scan screen. With the odd-greenish color of the screen, Rey’s leg looks more like a building schematic than part of a person. “She’ll need artificial meniscus as well. Unless that’s something you can regrow on an artificial bone?” 

Finn shakes his head. “Nope, needs to be biological.” The Force may run through everything in the universe, but he can’t make anything that has never known life grow, not even with the amplifier. 

“I might have some lab-grown bone. I’d rather go bio if I can. I’ll ask the general to approve it, but I doubt she’ll say no for her  _ padawan _ .” Finn doesn’t know what to do with the emphasis of the word and the disdain he perceives in it. She’s never shown any anti-Force user sentiment with him running around, gizmo pumping up his paltry abilities.“I’m going to ask for approval for the bone, then we’ll get her prepped for surgery. After she’s under, you can see what you can do about that hip.”

“I don’t want to be put under,” growls Rey.

There’s nothing he can do while she’s awake. The amplifier had sent her into seizures before and he’ll be working too close to her to take the risk, even if she’d successfully used it after that when putting Hux’s spine back together. 

“No choice,” says Doctor Boccaree. “I don’t do surgeries like that unless I’m on a battlefield.” 

She leaves behind a seething Rey in her wake. “Hey,” Finn says, patting her arm. “I’ll look after you while you’re under. You know that.”

The sharp anger he sees in her eyes takes several moments to fizzle, longer than normal, but then, she hasn’t usually been shot. “I hate this medbay.”

Technically, this wasn’t the medbay she’d been in following the crash, but he follows her meaning well enough. She’s harboring some resentments around her concussion. She’d gone so far as to refuse to wear the medical gown that they generally worked with. She’s sitting there in her underclothes: a utilitarian-looking beige bra (not a frill in sight) with matching beige panties. The small strip of panty that rests on her hip is bloodied, though the wound itself isn’t actively gushing anymore.

“Want me to find you a blanket?” Finn asks. 

Rey nods. “Yes, please.”

He fiddles around in the cupboards. “How long was the trip back?” he asks. 

“Six hours, maybe, once I got to the  _ Falcon _ .” She stands up and cups some of the water from the small hand washing sink, drinking more like an animal than a woman. “I piloted a Knight of Ren’s tie fighter to get back.”

He raises his eyebrows at her, passing her the thickest blanket he could find. She accepts it and answers one of his hundred unspoken questions with a smile. “It was faster than I expected. Small, but fast. Acceleration was almost as good as the  _ Falcon _ , up to a point. We might want to go back for it, to add it to the fleet, if the others don’t come to retrieve it.”

She creates a nest for herself on the reclining medical table, her bad leg stuck out from the blanket while he finds a cup that he then fills with water. She curls up and he’s glad he remembered how easily cold she gets even while fully clothed. 

He passes her the cup. “You’re freaking me out. So, you found one of the knights?”

The casual debriefing that they’d had in the general’s quarters had said nothing about the other Knights of Ren. Now that he thinks about it, it’s kind of obvious that they would still be out there, wreaking havoc separate from the First Order. Finn himself has never seen one, would probably shit himself if he did.

She nods. “I can see them using these places to replenish themselves after losing their leader. I would be surprised if I don’t come across more.”

As usual when she talks about this stuff, Finn doesn’t like it. “Let’s hope there’s not a cluster of them.” He points to the ruined knee. “Now that we can see what one can do.”

Rey shakes her head. “I wasn’t ready for them. I will be expecting them next time.”

“Didn’t you hope to find Kylo Ren? He has to be a lot more dangerous than one of his lackeys.”

She glares at him, which he doesn’t feel he deserves. “Would you rather be doing this?” she asks sourly.

He’s got to remember not to agitate her when she’s got a blasted knee and a stabbed hip; she’s in a mean mood. He hadn’t meant to imply that he doubted her skills. Hell, she probably could take on a group of bad guys, but he doesn’t want her to come back to the medbay any more than she does. 

Dr. Bocaree’s return is conveniently timed. Her hands are full of medical equipment and she sets each item down as she speaks. “We’re cleared to use the bio-bone which means that I’ll want your assistance with the knee as well if you think you can handle both consecutively?” 

When they were still fighting (when there were still patients), he’d performed way more than just two procedures back to back. “Yeah, not a problem.”

“Good.” She nods, then shifts her attention to her patient. “Rey, would you like to pass along a message to Hux before we begin?”

“Can he come in?” Rey asks. Her voice doesn’t sound as confrontational, suddenly. Funny, the mention of Hux usually has the opposite effect on him, like now, when he just wants her to get healed up and not be distracted by her redemption-pet- project-turned-boyfriend. 

“Sure. I’ll need him out for the operation, but he can visit with you while Finn and I finish prep.” 

Yeah, he should be helping get things ready, but he doesn’t like how she volunteered him, nor that part of her reason for doing so was so that Rey and Hux can have alone time. Finn pouts, but when his eyes catch the doctor’s, he declines the argument. Instead, he sets a hand on Rey’s shoulder. “I’ll be right there fixing those wounds up, making sure that there’s no ugly scars. Unless, you want me to try and keep one, just for bragging rights?” He says jokingly. 

“I’d rather you not.”

After a small kiss on Rey’s cheek, he follows Dr. Boccaree out of the room, to the hallway that they must cross to get to the operating room.

“You have fifteen minutes with my patient,” says the doctor to Hux. The news doesn’t surprise him, and why should it? Rey had probably already cued him in telepathically. 

The prep process doesn’t take long and once he’s working, everything else - his worry for her continuing pursuit of Kylo Ren and his apprehension about the end of the Resistance - disappears. It took him months before he could perform Force-powered tissue repair without feeling nauseated. Finn pushed through it, not without complaint, but he did it. Now, he’s diving into Rey’s wounds without even a twinge. It’s not just because it’s her, either, but because he’s finally building up the iron gut that comes with being in the medical field. Trauri teased him about how he wasn’t going to hack it, but he’s finally hit his rhythm and he may hate doing it, but that’s never been the point. He’s earning the walls around him and serving something bigger than himself the best way he can. 

The skin is pissed, but it’s not infected, which Dr. Boccaree had needlessly reminded him to check for, so he starts from the deepest part of the stab. The hollowed-out flesh is a semi-circle, from a curved blade. He can see where it went in and how, when pulled back out, it had taken pieces of her with it. Man, That really must have hurt. He knits the tissues back together, encouraging various types of blood cells this way and that, conducting them like an orchestra. The body heals itself like no one has ever found a way to do with mechanical equipment, but it cares only about function, not about how it’s gonna look when it’s finished. He puts extra care into the shallower parts of the hip wound. Who knows what she’ll look like by the time she finally produces the monster she’s been seeking, but he’ll do what he can for now.

The knee is way worse, a close-range shot from a blaster that had popped through her patella like paper. All Dr. Boccaree has to do is open wider what’s already revealed. It’s amazing that Rey was able to get back to them, that she’d been hobbling around in the medbay fetching her own water because she’s not accustomed to just asking for things she needs. Finn watches what the doctor does, in case he needs to do something similar in the future, but it’s pretty gruesome. 

By the time that she needs him, he’s ready to breathe some freshly recirculated air to cleanse the nausea lightly playing on the back of his tongue, but instead, he dives in, finding the damaged cartilage. It’s not as bad as it could be, just cut short more than decimated. He urges it to replenish, to find attachment points on the new bone, whispers to it in the wordless language of the Force that it should accept it as its new home. He can feel the way its strings pop up like vines moving way faster than they could naturally, seeking out the places they belong. Instinct does the work. He’s merely the usher. 

He doesn’t realize that he’s sweating until Dr. Boccaree wipes the perspiration from his forehead. He smiles. “Thanks,” he says. “I’m almost done.”

The procedure takes longer than they expected, and Finn feels shaky when they wrap up, but he thinks he did good work. Rey should be back on her feet in no time, ready to risk more kneecaps to the cause. 

He wishes he could contact Poe, ask him if he wouldn’t like to watch a holovid, something funny, in his quarters. The last time he’d done that after a rough day, the criminally mischievous man had brought over  _ The Balding Wookie _ , a holovid so bad that Finn swore it had permanently knocked his intelligence down. He pictures Poe with his soulful long-lashed eyes passing him a smoking stick of some intoxicant that makes the movie better and the wide grin when Finn coughs. He could use that kind of brainless escapism tonight, could just plain old use Poe. 

He’ll leave tomorrow if Rey’s okay with it. He’ll stay if she wants it, but she’s got Hux, worm that he is, and she’ll probably say it’s fine. He’ll miss her as much once he’s back on board the  _ Raddus _ as he does Poe here. Doomed to always be missing someone. 

  
  
  


Millicent isn’t scared of him anymore, even though she looks so tiny in his hand. When he squirts the syringe of milk into her mouth she purrs, her head occasionally peeking to the side, as though she expects her littermates to appear and steal the meal from her. Hux wishes that at least one other one had survived so that she wouldn’t be just one more sad abandoned soul on this ship. Sometimes he offers her a paste on his fingers and she likes that even more, her tiny kitten teeth biting at his fingertips. Ginevra says he should get her onto solid foods soon, but he’ll miss these times of having her excited little squeals and the vibrations of her purrs right in his hands. She looks healthier already, less like a drain clog and more like an animal. 

He wishes that it was as easy to nurture his other roommate. 

Rey had balked at Ginevra’s recommendation of a week’s recovery, and he knows she’s got it in her head that she’ll be leaving tomorrow, after only three days. It’s more dangerous to set off injured, but Saraboth knows he can only take her sulking that much longer anyway, and he supports her decision partially for selfish reasons. She’s insufferable when she has cabin fever.

“I think I’ll start her on the solid food tomorrow,” he says. 

Rey, examining a star map in bed, bad knee propped up on pillows, grunts. 

“How much of your sour mood is your knee?” It’s something he’s wondered about the past couple days, detecting low-level anger from her since the surgery. He hopes that it’s just the delay or just the pain from the knee, which she denies feeling. He doesn’t want her continued inability to find her target to be the cause, nor does he want her to have realized that one of the lesser Knights of Ren had almost killed her and that maybe their leader could be more successful at the endeavor. 

She glares at him, not in a good enough mood for ribbing. “I’m not sour; I’m focused.”

“Right,” he says. To Millie, he stage-whispers, “That glare was obviously a look of focus, not sourness.”

Rey growls. “You don’t understand.” The electronic glow of the map vanishes as she turns off her datapad. She rubs at her face with the palm of her hand, scrunching the smooth skin. “Armitage…” she complains. 

Even just asking questions right now is a way to poke his lovely friend turned bristly bear, and while he knows this, she’s been this tense for days and his patience is wearing thin. Millie’s meal done, she squirms out of his hand, landing clumsily on the bed. Her small four legs take her to Rey. Ginevra assures him that Millie will get stealthy, but she still hobbles around as though her head is too big to support her frame. The sight of the kitten coming at her does lift the corners of her mouth and she sets her hand out in greeting. 

“You’re not yourself, my dear friend. Is this how it’s to be until you find the monster you’re looking for?”

“Maybe,” she admits. She tickles at the orange furball’s chest. “I’m close though. I mean, if I can find one, I can find the others.”

More stab wounds and blasted joints, hurrah. He can’t say that to her, though she might hear him think it. In case she does, he backtracks. “It’s your life to risk as you will. It’s just that I’m starting to see the psychological effects this pursuit is taking.”

Rey pulls back from Millie, crosses her arms over her chest, and avoids eye contact. He can feel spiteful words before he hears them, her body telegraphing her intentions. “Maybe you should leave the therapy to Marshall.” And there they are. 

Hux rises, done with this conversation, done, for the moment, with her shitty disposition. “I’m going for a stroll. If there’s anything that you want me to fetch while I’m out, just think at me.” It’s nice to see the quick flash of regret on her face, but she doesn’t stop him either, just nods. 

He counts off his steps, like a beginner learning to dance (1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4), an old habit he’d picked up. He liked the way that it created a rhythm with the clip of his boots against the metal floors of the Finalizer and it helped to clear his head, so he’d stuck with it. He’s on a three when he hears his name called out. 

There’s a gathering of fifteen or so people in the rec room that sits at the end of the quarters’ hallway just before the lifts. Granna lowers her raised arm, the one she’d been waving, and her dark lips turn upward in an awkward smile. “You headin’ somewhere ‘portant?” she asks.

He enters the room, still feeling a touch the outsider, despite the long months he’s spent with these people. He knows everyone in the room, and to his knowledge, none of them actively hate him, but he wouldn’t blame them if they did. He’d committed the worst crime on galactic record and not suffered a single negative consequence for it. He doesn’t know how it is that he hasn’t been assassinated, let alone why so many have embraced his presence. “Just taking a stroll,” he says. 

“That case, you sha join us,” she offers. 

He notices that they’ve got two boards out, one standard dejarik, and the other a game that he doesn’t recognize. He moves closer, examining the layout of the unknown game. It’s a digitized planet surface, scant on details, but there are buildings in different hues and their placement seems to begin from points on the four sides of the board. “Who can expand their territory the most?” he guesses. 

“First to fill the city quadrant,” answers Kunal. He’s a wizard at loading bay management and Hux has thought many a time that he could have used a man like that on the  _ Finalizer _ . He hopes that General Leia knows her troops’ strengths and weaknesses enough to see she’s lucky to have Kunal. 

“With the limitation of resource allocation,” says Hayfa. 

“Occupants?” Hux asks. She confirms immediately with a nod. 

Interesting. Well, he has nowhere else to be, not with Rey emanating hostility back in his quarters, so he pulls up a seat to observe. Depending on the game length, he thinks, he might be able to play. The thought that he might not pick up the game mechanics in the amount of time the game has left doesn’t occur to him, and for good reason. He plays the next two, coming close to winning the first, and winning the second. He tries not to let the praise affect his head, but it feels good to excel at something, even something so mundane, for a little bit. 

When he returns to his quarters, Rey’s already snuggled up in bed, a small orange orb on the pillow just above her head. As he approaches the bed, Millie takes off. Eventually, she’ll find her way back, and drawn by the lure of pets and their body heat will mew to be lifted into the bed. He carefully moves in beside Rey; she wakes anyway. She wraps herself around him, pulling on his hand and moving the knuckles to her cheek. His heart thrums with warm affection. 

“I can feel when I’m being mean,” she whispers. 

He doesn’t point out that he can too. That they work through their negative emotions together is an amazing opportunity he’s never gotten before. Hell, he never got to talk about his own, let alone work with someone else’s. 

“It’s a lot of pressure,” she adds, almost an excuse.

He strokes her cheek where her hand is still holding his. “I know about pressure,” he says, forgiving her. 

“I think it’ll get worse.” 

He isn’t sure whether she’s talking about the pressure or her mood, but they’re closely related enough that it doesn’t matter. “Force premonition or just a guess?” he asks. 

“I don’t know.”

He glides his free hand over her bare shoulder and the skin rises in little bumps. Neither of them is ticklish, but both are sensitive to touch, especially soft touch. He can handle the bad moods, as long as he remembers to often take walks before speaking something he shouldn’t. As for the pressure... “If I can bear any of your burdens, I expect you to inform me.”

“Just… stay,” she says. 

A request easily fulfilled. He kisses the goosebumped skin and she sighs. “Wherever you need me, Scavenger; I will be.” 

  
  
  


Luke insists upon wearing the overdramatic Jedi robes; Luckily, he’d allowed them to be washed, but Leia’s suggestions (there have been more than one) that he find something more starship-appropriate have been met with firm resistance. She knows how much Obi-Wan had meant to her brother, a guiding light during a time when he’d had nothing else to hold onto, but that doesn’t mean that he needs to emulate him now, and certainly not this hopeless broken-down banished version of the man that Luke presents. She glares at the drawn back grey hood, letting her annoyance just play out across her face - he’s not looking at her anyway, scanning over the datapad in his hand. 

He looks up at the same moment that she feels Rey’s presence outside the door. With a heavy sigh, Leia goes to the door to answer it; this may be unpleasant but it’s also unavoidable. Since Luke’s arrival on the  _ Observer _ , Leia’s been bracing herself for the girl’s reaction. It was impossible that she hadn’t heard from Finn about his unexpected hitchhiking. 

“Rey,” she nods to the taller young woman. “Come in.”

Rey’s jaw is tight, high, and she walks in stiffly. She sees Luke but doesn’t say a thing to him. Instead, she addresses Leia, arms plastered to her sides. “I’m leaving this morning for location Beta.”

“And the doctor suggested a week?” asks Leia. They both know exactly how long Dr. Boccaree recommended Rey stay off her new knee and repaired hip, but they also know that Rey never had any intention of staying around that long.

“It will take nearly two days to arrive there, plenty of extra healing time.” She was prepared for the question. 

Leia nods. She wouldn’t have tried to stop her even if it had been an hour away. There’s no point in trying to restrain some people, Rey among these - Leia herself is not easily caged, as her late husband would have attested. “Let us know if your search turns up anything.” 

“Of course.” Rey spares a side glance at Luke who is diligently looking at the datapad. “I’ll do my best to find him and bring him home.  _ I _ won’t let you down.” 

Leia considers, just for the briefest of seconds, defending her brother, but he’s a grown man and certainly mature enough to handle a mild scolding from a child. She embraces Rey, as she always does, and watches her prickly padawan leave.

When she crosses the room near Luke, his mirthful ice-blue gaze is on her. The corner of his mouth tweaks as he says, “She really hates me.”

She fidgets, twirling one of the large rings on her finger. Yes, Rey does hate her brother, blames him for having to fight Snoke on her own. She thinks that Luke doesn’t care, but his apathy has never been a problem. If anything, her brother feels too much, that’s why he’d set out time and again to make the galaxy a safer place no matter what dangers it put him in. 

“How would you have felt if Obi-Wan had refused to train you?” she asks softly. It’s hitting below the belt, maybe, but she knows that it’s an apt comparison. Her prot é g é had needed guidance and he’d refused. Her anger, while misplaced, is understandable. 

“Don’t play the What-If game with me; I’m much better at it,” he says grumpily. 

“Am I allowed to ask you yet what it was that you saw?” 

The only explanation for his sudden appearance has been this vision that he refuses to describe and it’s driving her mad. She’s grateful to have him here, but his silence has her waiting for another shoe to drop. Is it related to Ben? To the Resistance? Is something dreadful coming their way? Not all Force visions come true, she knows this, but he could at least tell her why he found it important enough to come (after all this time) to stand by her side.

“You can ask…” he taunts. 

She resists the urge to smack the back of his head, but not by much. 


	3. Chapter 3

Hiegis

The terrain of Hiegis is not uniform like Ru’offhur; rather than an endless expanse of grassland, there are forests and deserts and tundras and oceans. She’d heard tales of assorted worlds from other junkers on Jakku. There were, they’d say, places with cities built so high that you couldn’t see any of the suns and whole planets that were nothing but water. She’d believed them, but while she was as skilled at make-believe as any lonely child, the true diversity in the galaxy is beyond what she’d been capable of imagining. Though she’s focused on her goal of defeating evil, she can’t help but marvel as she zips the  _ Millenium Falcon _ up the coastline, waves rippling out ahead of her. 

She flies as low as she dares. Her random landing on Ru’offhur hadn’t been the best way to go; she might have died of an infection before ever making it back to the  _ Falcon _ if it hadn’t been for the knight’s ship. She’s safer up here. If she has to, she’ll resort to searching from the ground again, but first, she wants to give the planet a thorough look from above. If there’s some marker that stands out as much as the tree, it shouldn’t be hard. 

She isn’t actually expecting something as defined as the tree, another giant location of gravitas, so when that’s exactly what she gets, it’s so jarring that she nearly loses her grip on the  _ Falcon _ ’s controls. The mountain is covered in snow, but it glows black in her vision. It’s massive, wide at the base and taller than any other peak she’s seen. She slows the  _ Falcon _ almost to a hover but there’s something within her that is screeching full-stop too. A mountain is just a collection of rocks and yet… it’s waiting for her. She swallows hard. BB8 beeps inquisitively.

“Yes, I think so,” she answers. She’s going to have to land on it, somehow. As carefully as she can, she circles the monstrosity. There are jagged edges and small spires of black rock where even the snow refuses to fall. She doesn’t know if the whole thing is the place of power or if it’s just one spot. How is she supposed to find out? Just climbing the mountain would take weeks. How is she supposed to find room for a 35-meter craft on this angled beast?

There are clouds, big fluffy ones, that enwrap the mountain and she almost dismisses the insignificant smoke plume as one. She pulls out binoculars as BB8 frets about her one-handed piloting with the kind of winds kicked up around the mountain. It’s smoke, rising from the mountain itself, striations of grey within the white. She draws closer to it, and while she can’t identify its origin, she does spot a summit. It’s barely bigger than the  _ Falcon _ . 

Rey’s used to doing stupid things to get where she needs to go; today will be no exception. 

“Hang on,” she tells BB8. “I’m going to try to land.” 

The angle is odd even if the summit is relatively flat and the winds coming from the west create resistance, discouraging her tilt. She’d feel better if there were perhaps a few fewer trees around the perimeter as well. Why must they grow at such altitudes? 

It’s a rocky touchdown but she manages to stick it, or at least she thinks. After releasing the controls, the  _ Falcon _ decides to take just one sledding trip. She watches as the snowbank in front of them moves forward and she curses just before the ship collides with one of those trees she’d been hoping to avoid. She and BB8 lurch forward, and she has her hands on the controls ready to start her up again if they fall further, but they remain reassuringly still. 

“Han would yell at me,” she says with a smile. Not that the rascal would have been able to talk, not if half the stories of his adventures are true. “Well, shall we see what’s inside?” she asks BB8 rhetorically. 

Without other guideposts, she sets off for the smoke cloud, her body amply insulated against the cold. This would not be another Ilum, fighting a mad man in her Jakku outfit; she’s wearing thick water-resistant pants and coat. There are ties woven into the sides, little bungee cords for utility; these she uses for her lightsaber. 

The ground makes loud crunches beneath her feet and each step brings her in tune with the mood of the place. She feels more powerful with the mountain under her, like she had with the tree, her powers in the Force magnifying. She is part of something, something enormous, proud, and strong. By the time she arrives at the cave, she’s already expecting it. The fire scent is strong. Her portable light glistens off the icy parts of the cave walls, illuminates greater than its normal ability. She finds that she doesn’t need it. Somehow the white of the walls reflects easily the sunlight outside. Indeed, when she turns off the portable light, the place seems to glow blue with phosphorescence. 

She removes her lightsaber from its tethers and continues carefully further inside. It’s impossible to differentiate an evil being through the darkness of the mountain. She’s got the smoke, a sign of life here, but she can’t lock onto anything. It would be like finding a particular splash of water in an ocean. What she can feel is the proximity of the core of that darkness and that’s where her path is taking her. She follows a branch of the cave system that leads upwards. It’s slightly away from the fire smell, but its call, its existence is what’s brought her to Hiegis, not the smoke. The voices start, the ones that she’d heard in the cave and at the tree, and she follows their whispers and that black pit in her vision.

She gets stuck at one point, the icy walls narrowing too much to allow passage, though she can see a larger area just ahead. It looks to be a round room, a hollowed-out space. She can make out etchings on the far walls from the natural window formed by the cozy dead end. She’s just resigning herself to turning back and finding another entrance to the room when she hears a tremendous crash behind her. 

She whirls to see a large enraged creature. Its mouth is slightly ajar, teeth of all sizes and angles jutting from its lips, nose flat with flared nostrils, and four angry wide eyes. In the time it takes her to bring up her saber, it’s thrown itself at the cubby she’s in, and it’s a small miracle that she’d been wedged in because the beast can’t quite reach her. She stabs at its grasping claws and it cries out, not appreciating the burning sear, but not retreating. It tries again, and she stabs it away. They are at an impasse created by the tight fit of the walls. She can’t strike its vulnerable spots and it can’t get at her, can’t pick her up in its giant arms and beat the life out of her. 

She’s not afraid like she should be, but angry. She wants to get to it as much as it tries for her. She wants it to bleed for daring to have come at her in the first place. Doesn’t it know who she is? She defeated Snoke, brought down the First Order with that one action; a stupid snow beast isn’t even worth her time to fight. She yells at it, and the sound of her voice surprises her. She sounds animalistic. The creature must agree, for it roars in response, swinging at the wall around her, as though it intends to bring the whole cave around them. She takes the opportunity to lunge for its armpit.

The creature cries out and drops. Rey’s bewilderment at the thing’s easy defeat is quickly allayed, for behind the animal’s carcass is a Knight of Ren, its weapon poised menacingly above the creature’s back where it had just struck. 

Now fear absolutely flares in her. She watches as the heavily-armored man swings down again with the most sizable cleaver she’s ever seen. True to its name, the weapon splits the beast in two. The sickening clunk of metal on bone and the easy swish of meat tearing fills her ears. When the knight raises the cleaver again, she sees the way that the blood rushes from the top downward in a torrent. It looks at her.

The helmet that this one wears looks like a face. It has lips and eyes, or what approximates them on a mask. It looks to have a secondary hat with flared sides; they don’t obstruct side vision as the last knight’s had. It has no expression but watches her grimly. Everything on him is so black, like space, like unconsciousness as a hue. He doesn’t move. Her lightsaber sizzles in the otherwise quiet air.

“I’m looking for Kylo Ren,” she says, voice not betraying her fear.

There’s a moment’s pause and then it lifts the cleaver. She raises her saber, ready to engage, but rather than squeezing between the tight ice cave walls and attempting to rend her in two, he swings it down again into the carcass at his feet. This time, he takes off a leg. With horror, she watches him dismember the creature, limb by limb. She can feel the saber vibrate in her hands, the slight shake to her core stretching out that far. It puts the cleaver away, latching it onto some connection on his back. She lowers but doesn’t power down her weapon. Then, he bends down, and grabs up one half of the now limbless body, throws it, blood-drenched, over his shoulder, and walks away from Rey without a word.

She stands there, shaking, uncertain. Her mind races. What had been the point of that? Had it saved her? Where was it going with the body? What was she to do now? She takes a deep breath and tries to tap into the Force. The problem with this standard course of action for when she’s feeling unsure is that this is a Sith place, and the power that she taps into is not the calming wise kind, but the exaggerated emotional kind. She feels its false message of strength and passion and power. The voices, the words she can’t interpret, she hears them again. It’s not wise to meditate here. Best to follow her intuition. She turns off the saber and steps out over the decimated corpse into the larger cave. She trails the knight, its lumbering footsteps easily tracked. 

Unsurprisingly, the smell of smoke gets stronger as they travel, and finally, they arrive in the cave with the fire. It’s a larger space, and she notes the simplistic bedding and travel pack on the ground. The knight sits, and pulling out a knife begins to work at the meat, cutting it down into smaller chunks. He’s going to eat it, she realizes. The action is so strangely person-like that it hadn’t occurred to her until seeing him actually prepping his food. He’s ignoring her completely to have dinner.

“Where is Kylo Ren?” she demands.

His grim helmet observes her before turning to a secondary entrance to the cave. He’s indicating it.

She shakes her head, “I know he isn’t here. I need to find him.”

But the helmet doesn’t deviate, not even while the knife slices bloody tidbits for a meal. She doesn’t have to take his suggestion, but that damn curiosity of hers leads her to check it out. She steps widely around him, unsure if he’ll unleash that cleaver upon her if she gets too near, but she makes it unharmed through the passage.

This path also goes up, and she knows intuitively, that this is the true path to the room she’d espied before the giant animal had tried to make her lunch. Eerily, she hears her name on the non-lips of the dead as she makes her way to the Sith place of power. It’s not circular, but close, decorated naturally by stalagmites that create a loose ring. In the center of the room is a thick black etched marking. Her hand swipes at her ear, as though she could pull out the voices, banish the sensation creeping up her spine. 

If she speaks to them here, those departed dark side users, they will hear her. She could ask where Kylo Ren is, but what would be the price? Certainly more than Jusbrann the pirate haggled for in exchange for coordinates. Whenever she arrives back on board the  _ Observer _ , she feels like she belongs, like she is someone important to those whom she’s returning. Here, the feeling is echoed but distorted. She senses a darker acceptance. The forces here want something for her, they want her to slot herself into the place they’ve made for her. It isn’t a return because she’s never embraced the dark side, not for more than seconds at a time, but still, they offer her something like a return. 

She squats next to the marking, carefully touches it, and though the ground is as cold as anything else here, it feels warm through her glove. She reflects upon killing Snoke, not the act, but the emotion. She’s not sure there wasn’t something dark at play that day. She’d wanted to do it again. She wanted to gut through every slimy devil who thought they could control her life, who wanted to harm her friends, who wanted to create discord. If there had been a line of Snokes, all the villains of the galaxy, she’d have taken her saber to each one of them, eliminating everything she didn’t like at once. She wonders what it would be like to truly let herself go, to avenge every injustice by just snuffing out life. All the parents of abandoned girls…

Her trance becomes a vision, one that her immobility forces her to watch. She sees herself, not as she is but as she could be. She’s a powerful dark side user, one the galaxy fears as much as Darth Vader or Kylo Ren. Face half-obscured by a black hood, her own eyes warped into a reptilian shape staring into her soul. Her staff has been made into a lightsaber, both ends glowing a deadly red. She enjoys their fear. She told herself she was doing the right thing but the bodies kept piling up: the First Order, the Imperialists, the slavers. She kept going: those who tried to stop her, those who committed petty crimes, those who didn’t fear her. Rivers of blood dissolve her soul. 

When she snaps out of her trance, she has to fight back vomit. She pulls her hand back from the floor and covers her mouth with it, but nothing comes out. Evil places have evil thoughts.

There’s no Ben Solo here; she has to move on.

By the time she returns to the fire room, there are bones in a stack and the knight and his equipment are nowhere to be seen. He had to have removed his helmet to eat, and she kicks herself for not having stayed to see what lurked under the mask. She keeps her hand near the hilt of her lightsaber, not trusting the impromptu truce, as she leaves to make her way back down to the _ Falcon _ . There hadn’t been as many turns as the cave where she’d found the star maps, so she hadn’t bothered leaving flares. 

She’s suspicious when she makes it to the summit without encountering the knight. The  _ Falcon _ sits, ass pressed up against three snow-less trees, the impact having dusted them off. Rey looks from side to side but spots no one. Perhaps the knight will get word to Kylo that she’s on the hunt for him. She can’t imagine that Kylo doesn’t already know. Intuition compels her to light up her saber. She continues forward and screams as a trap springs, slamming hard over her foot. 

A shadow falls over her and she turns, swinging the lightsaber as she does, and it connects with the knight, timing just right to drive the sparking blade further in with his forward momentum. Still, the combination of the impact and her immobilized foot doesn’t give her much chance for recovery and she falls to the snow below her as the wounded knight moves away. The cleaver isn’t out, but he’s got the small knife that he’d used on the beast, and that’s disturbing in its own right. She attempts to raise herself, her hand falling further into the bank rather than providing her purchase and he comes at her again, taking a swing with his blade at her stuck leg. She defends, barely. 

Finally, she gets to her feet. She hasn’t had time to look at the trap, but she knows by the intense pain that it’s going to be gruesome. Her foot does not want her standing on it, but she’s got giving it the choice. She glares at the knight as it circles her. She shouts at it. “I am not your next meal!” In response, he switches the knife to his other hand, and charges again, aiming low. 

With a speed she’ll be impressed about later, she cleanly dodges and counters. The blade slices into the knight again. She doesn’t know where the first stab landed, but she sees this go into the fiend’s neck. The man staggers and she takes advantage of the opportunity, aiming straight for the impassive lips of the mask. She skewers the knight through the face mercilessly. When she pulls back her lightsaber, he falls to the ground. “I am a Sith slayer,” she spits. 

She breathes through the adrenaline, the panting sounding more like it belongs to a tired happabore. She wants to stab the body again, just for revenge, but she doesn’t. Instead, she waits for the homicidal rage to leave her. It takes a while, but finally, it ebbs. She bends down, pushing the snow away from her foot. It’s as bad as she expected. Why did it have to be  _ that _ leg?

  
  
  


“Buddy!” Poe yells out seconds before getting the wind knocked out of him with the force of the hug that he shares with Finn. They’re twirling, then, almost like they’re both trying to lift each other off the ground. He can feel boyish glee deep in his heart, and he releases it through unashamed laughter.  _ His _ Finn. Well, not his Finn, but his Finn in some sort of way, one of the ways that really matter, one that you bet your ass is good enough, even if not the best way.

He’s got his hands gripping the back of his old jacket like he thinks that his friend will just evaporate if he doesn’t hold on tight. For goodness sake, it hasn’t even been two months! That’s the thing about being a front-line pilot, though, you never know when it will be the last time so you have to treat each time with as much respect as it’s due. It’s Finn who finally loosens, his bright shining smile a star that has been missing from Poe’s sky. 

“Hey, so how have you been?” Finn asks.

“Great, man. We keep sending those bastards crying home to their mamas.” He grabs onto Finn’s arm and pulls him along, eager to share with the others that their favorite former stormtrooper is back on board. They have a few new faces on board the Finalizer, but mostly it’s the same old shit-kickers from before, and he doesn’t know a one of them that doesn’t think that Finn is keen as a peach. “Those that don’t defect anyway. You set one mighty fine example for how to walk away from a bad situation!”

Despite the bravado that Finn wears, he’s as insecure as they come, so he gives Poe a look of skepticism. It’s good that he doesn’t realize how awesome he is or he’d be a major dickweed. “How many have defected?” Finn asks.

“Uh, not sure on the numbers, but I know it’s a lot.” Poe steers his friend into a room with three pilots standing around talking and they all stop and make boisterous noise at Finn’s appearance. Finn needs it. It hadn’t been hard to read between the lines in his brief transmission from Leia.  _ Keep him busy _ he took to mean that Finn’s been bored as hell switching from frontlines to recovery work, but then, he could have guessed that already. She’d mentioned a “couple weeks,” and he feels like that’s a flexible range for her. Must not be a lot of sick people on board the  _ Observer _ . Even here on the Raddus, their skirmishes are low on casualties with most battles merely demonstrations of power and a lot of backing down on the part of the dying Imperial remnant.

After the pleasantries subside, Poe again yanks Finn out of the room, promising they’ll get to see more of him. It would have lapsed into uncomfortable conversation soon anyway. 

“You going to be just dragging me around all day?” asks Finn in annoyance.

Poe smiles. “Maybe.” He likes how solid the arm in his hand is, like he’s not just daydreaming that his best friend is back. “This is for maximum efficiency.” He deserves the doubtful eyebrow that’s raised at him. “Maybe I just don’t want to let go,” he jokes, not joking. 

He waits for the flirtation-joke to land, to see how it’s received. Finn’s face softens. In a quieter voice, he says, “I can stay awhile, man. No need to cram it all in at once.”

Poe releases him. “Right. Well, then what is it that you want to do?” It’s an important question for the other man, one that he knows Finn hates and loves at the same time. He hadn’t gotten to have opinions before even though he had plenty; choice-making is probably never going to be his forte. 

“Let me catch you up with what’s been going on and then we can watch the worst holovid you’ve got?”

Hugging him would probably be too much, but it’s just such a perfect suggestion and Poe is way happier right now than he was this time yesterday, and, honestly, he was pretty happy then. “Good call, but you’re going to need to bleach your eyes after the holovid.”

Finn rolls his eyes. “I’d expect nothing less.”

  
  


“Oh, I miss these old rooms!” sighs Finn, tackling Poe’s large couch. He’s slept on this thing at least a quarter as often as his own bed aboard the  _ Raddus _ . “The  _ Observer _ is a bluefish can. I have to have my bed up against the wall or else I can’t walk to the ‘fresher.”

Poe sets up the holovid while Finn holds a cushion over his face, basking in the smell of a hundred nights spent just as they intend to spend this one - snacks, holovid, laughter, griping, and gossip. He’s so comfortable and relaxed that he startles when Poe snatches up his feet so that he can sit too. “Did I wake you?” asks Poe, teasing.

Finn grins, pillow moved down to his chest. “Nah, man, just good to be back.”

“You should move back over here.” He yanks on Finn’s boots which he hadn’t bothered taking off before making himself one with the couch. “Rey’s gone most of the time anyway.” 

“Been thinking about it,” he says quietly as Poe tosses the removed footwear towards the door.

“Yeah?” Poe says with a bright happy smile. 

“It’s boring on the  _ Observer _ . Only injuries I see anymore are muscle strains from lifting supply boxes.” The griping has started early tonight; his friend won’t mind - as a matter of fact, he looks ecstatic that Finn isn’t happy on such a faraway ship.

“Well, we don’t have much more than that, but at least you’d have the pleasure of my company if you came back. That right there is worth its weight in gold.”

“Been thinking about what comes after. You know, once you lot free all the occupied territories and such.” Poe watches him intensely because he understands the importance of the conversation. Finn’s practically whispering though, another glorious remnant of his days as a trooper, because it feels traitorous to talk about his plans for the future out loud. “Like, what I should do, where I should go.” 

“Any ideas?” asks Poe lightly.

“None.”

Suddenly, the pilot shifts into pitch mode, a subset of ‘I have an idea’ mode, one that generally means that he’s thought it out more. “Well, in that case, let’s go to the Calely Islands. Beautiful gold-sand beaches, clear ocean water, and every ten feet there are bars just waiting to get you sauced.” His hands move around as he talks and Finn has to admit that the picture he paints is a nice one. “I’ll fly some flimsy kite, ferrying people back and forth a few days a week, and you can bring tourists their food or mix them some drinks, see if you like being in the service industry. At night, we’ll go dancing and learn how to surf.”

“That’s...a change.”

“You want a change,” says Poe, pressing a firm thumb into the bottom of Finn’s foot; if he rubs with enough pressure, it doesn’t tickle… as much. Finn hates being as ticklish as he is, so it’s good that his friend has found a workaround. “All this time spent in space, some sun would do us both some good.” 

“And what about Rey?”

“She can give tours for the inactive volcano on the island.” Finn grins at Poe’s quick addition. He can picture her repelling down into the volcano more easily than speaking to a group of people about it. 

“What if she doesn’t want to go with us?” That’s the crux of the issue, isn’t it? Finn being separated from his newly-formed family. 

Poe shrugs. “Then she can catch up with wherever we go next.” He really does seem genuinely unconcerned. Finn can’t help but feel that has something to do with Poe actually having been raised with a family; he doesn’t know what it’s like to truly have no one and so he’s not as afraid of being left out. He wishes that it was that easy for him. 

“And what if she wants to bring her pet project?” Finn asks, then groans as Poe hits a cranky knot on the underside of his foot just below his pinky toe. 

This, Poe doesn’t have an already formed answer for, meaning that Hux must not have been factored into his plans. “Scowling lessons?” Poe suggests quizzically. “Actually, he’s not too bad with numbers. He could be an accountant for my sightseeing flights, Rey’s volcano tours, and your cantina. We’ll have to keep a mask on his face so that people don’t murder him but there’s not much we can do about that.” He’s pleased with himself for his improvised solution.

“You really okay just having that guy along with us?”

This is an old fight. Well, more of an old discussion, but Finn gets defensive so it feels fight-like. Poe doesn’t mind Hux. He also doesn’t mind that Finn won’t forgive Hux. ‘You’re entitled to hate him. He’s done a lot of hateful things,’ Poe would say, trying to smooth things over. Sometimes Finn feels like he’ll never be satisfied until the rest of the galaxy hates Hux too, because it’s too crazy to think that not everyone does.

“Fine, we’ll push him into the volcano while he’s visiting Rey’s tour.”

“I thought you said it was inactive?”

“Still a long way to fall, but how’s the rest sound?”

The corner of Finn’s lips quirks up. “Sounds like paradise, man.”

Poe nods, certain. “Okay, then that’s that is the plan.” After a moment he adds, “We might have to refine the Hux details, but otherwise, we’re set.” 

“And what if her second pet project works out?” 

The hand on his foot stops moving. Yeah, that’s something neither of them wants to put much thought into. Finn doesn’t think it’s likely that she’ll be able to turn something so evil, but then, she’s still convinced that Hux did a 180. “I don’t know, buddy. I don’t know.” 

Somber atmospheres don’t often last long between them. Even when they’re talking about the heaviest shit that’s going on, it only takes one off-color joke on Poe’s part to bring everything back to normality. Their friendship is the best anti-depressant Finn knows. He breaks the quiet. “So, how bad is this holovid?”

“You’re gonna be begging me to put on the  _ Balding Wookie _ instead.” Poe doesn’t have an evil grin, but he’s trying for one, and Finn does his best to look intimidated.


	4. Chapter 4

Ivi Roit

Ivi Roit is a tiny planet with an even tinier amount of land and, aside from flourishing aquatic flora and fauna, is completely uninhabited. These conditions blend to create the perfect situation that Rey finds herself in: staring down at an all-black ship resting all alone on a swampy patch of land. The ship’s sleek black design is similar to the one she’d piloted back from the dark side tree to the Millenium _ Falcon _ , so even if she hadn’t been able to feel the evil rising from its abandoned cockpit (remnants of its pilot), she would still know to whom it belonged. She smiles horridly and fires the  _ Falcon _ ’s laser cannons. When it erupts in flame and smoke, her hands shake with a rush of excited pleasure. 

She’d opted to skip to target Zeta, rather than moving onto Gamma, thinking her foot would hinder her less in an ocean environment, and boy is she glad of her decision now. She waits for the fire to die down, all the time watching the waters for a sign of the ship’s knight. It peters out, too wet and lacking proper fuel to keep it going. Her landing has a sludgy quality to it, but the ship doesn’t sink. 

BB8 beeps at her again; she’d ignored its comments after she’d fired. “Just stay here,” she growls. 

She doesn’t need to feel self-conscious with the droid watching as she changes into a diving suit; she’d had the foresight to plan for any terrain, water included. She unwraps the gauze around her foot first, and it’s not looking good. The skin is red and angry and the wound itself has a yellow hue. After she leaves here, she’ll return to the  _ Observer _ . It’s not ideal, wastes more precious time, but it can’t be avoided. She’ll be of no use if the foot gets worse; it’s pulsing is already a distraction she can’t afford. 

Many months back, Poe had taken her and Finn on a detour from their mission to teach them how to swim. It had been terrifying and thrilling, an amount of water so massive that she could immerse herself in it. She’d been capable, but far from good at it. It’s impossible not to wish that she had Poe here with her now to rescue her if it turns out to be more than she can handle. Zipped into the suit, she prepares the DC-12U Beam rifle which can fire underwater as well as through air. She feels naked without it, but she leaves the lightsaber on the cockpit seat. 

The air outside the ship is breathable but awful, the stench of fetid aquatic plants and melted spacecraft overpowering. She grimaces, hand coming up instinctively to cover her nostrils. She traces a path around the marshy island, her suited feet sinking down in some places so that when she pulls them up, they make a loud slurping noise. The knight had landed beside where the land transitions into ocean, the smell of salt air just detectable beneath that of the smoke. She looks down into the murky water. Had the knight just dropped straight down, diving beneath the slightly lapping waves? 

She takes up a lotus position in the muck, watches the sea water ripple the plants around her, and she breathes deeply, a large gun draped across her lap. After some time, she barely notices the smell. After even longer, she connects with the dark pull under the water, feeling it waft around her, another odor in a way. Her body shifts softly from side to side, moving with the water. Her closed eyes flutter, only whites flashing behind them. It speaks to her, the darkness. Unlike the other Sith places, it’s only one voice she hears, deep, haunting. It feels kindred, like it understands the spots inside her that she hides from the world. 

The knight pulls itself from the water silently off to her side. She senses his hatred before he even breaks the surface, so it’s easy enough to follow his steps behind her. The thing in the deep waits. Rey continues to breathe, though her meditation is broken, and she crawls her finger along the gun to its trigger with the slowest movement. The knight is smaller than her power. Just as his ship had been no match for her ship’s weaponry, he is no match for the fire that burns within her. His feet make not even the faintest of squelching noises, and even with her ears straining to the best of their ability, she can’t hear even a drop of the ocean water falling off his armor. She tracks him anyway, her would-be hunter, another of Kylo Ren’s lackeys, another hurdle between her and the end of this fight.

He is just behind her when she raises up her weapon and, without looking, shoots. Either he’s not as fast as his brothers in arms, or he’d been too prideful, thinking that he had the advantage of surprise, but she hears his body drop, her aim true. She waits and listens for him to rise again, but there is no other sound. She pulls up the breathing gear and drops into the ocean.

She pushes, her body naturally pulling her towards the surface because of the air in her lungs, but there are weights in a band around her hips, and she kicks just as Poe had taught her. The water grows dark quickly, and she fidgets with the light source attached to the breathing apparatus. Fish that move like snakes flit away from her. There’s more life down here than up above, but she can’t connect to it as she usually does. The cause, the purple glow beneath her, grows brighter as she descends. She can’t focus on the light when she’s this close to it.

This Sith place of power is no place at all, but a creature. 

Its many eyes see her first, big lolling eyes that appear to have drowned in its rubbery voluminous body. She kicks less, slowing her progress, and it watches with a complete lack of judgment. There are at least twenty of the eyes, and while they should be blind down here with the continued absence of light save for the small bulb on her face, none appear to be. It’s monstrous, huge, half the size of the _Millenium_ _Falcon_ , maybe more, shaped like a drop of water with two floating arms, one on each side.

She hates it and all it represents. It hates too, nebulously. 

_ I’m here. Where is Kylo Ren? _ she thinks towards it, not sure if there’s any reasoning behind asking this thing such questions. It is as little a part of the world she inhabits as she is of its. It is as likely to know that answer as she would be to answer where the choicest fish were. It stares, apathetically.

_ I’m going to put an end to all like you _ , she threatens. When she’s onboard the  _ Observer _ , she knows about things like balance in the Force. Right now, she just wants to see all the evil things of the world obliterated. She wants to strip them of their dark powers. 

The dark creature resonates with a deep apathy, an emotion so contrary to the nature of the dark side that it takes her aback. There is no passion here, only general loathing and intense unconcern for the situation at hand. It is too immersed in its hatred to care that she’s threatening it, to care about anything other than that twisting inside. Its own hatred is bogging it down, rendering it useless for anything.

_ I’ll return when I’m done killing Ren and then I’ll move onto you _ , she thinks at it. Again, the eyes roll without purpose. It doesn’t fear her, and she’s too pumped up on her own hatred to fear it. She doesn’t want to leave it here, but it has nothing to give her, no information, no assistance. She considers raising up her gun, taking aim, but then, she might break the spell of its apathy, and she can sense how ancient and powerful it is. How long must it have spent down here, brooding, biding its time for something that will never happen? With a shudder, she moves her hands to the weight belt and drops the first one, then the next. It watches but makes no move to follow as she rises. 

The snake fish flee from her again as she kicks her way to the surface, anger and hatred driving her legs. She’ll come back, she promises herself, and she’ll end the thing’s miserable existence, for her if for no other reason. She’d already killed three knights of Ren and Snoke, what is a giant underwater mass of evil to her? 

Her knees wobble when she walks again on land, but she searches the body of the fallen knight. She takes his weapon, a modified machete, and she unhooks the breathing tubes of the helmet’s mask, revealing the face of the knight. She doesn’t recognize the non-human face beneath. No surprise there. She didn’t think they would all look like Kylo Ren, with his big brown innocent eyes. She replaces the mask and makes her way back to the ship. 

Her body is burning up when she removes the suit and her mouth is dry as sand. She sets a course for home, staying in her undergarments while she applies more bacta to her foot and chugs water with a Jakku-reminiscent desperation. The farther she gets from Ivi Roit, the more the ball of hate in her belly unravels, and the more acutely she feels the thrum of blood around her wounds and the pulse of her heartbeat in her cheeks. She realizes, eventually, her words to the creature. She hadn’t talked to it about reforming Ben Solo but killing Kylo Ren. She still tastes the murderous desire on her tongue, and can still feel the exhilaration of blowing up the knight’s ship. It doesn’t completely leave her, not even when she arrives back onboard the  _ Observer _ . 

  
  
  


When they get back from cards with the other pilots (boy, has he missed that), it’s too early to head to bed but too late to really bother finding something else to do. Poe’s still laughing about something that Mary said that had hit the man in just the right way. His head shakes from side to side and he mutters, “Not for every Imperial credit.” 

“She’s got a mouth on her. Bet she keeps you on your toes,” notes Finn, landing on the couch heavily. 

“Takes one to know one, but yeah.” Poe joins him, kicking off his boots and socks and opening up the collar of his top. “She says whatever pops into her head.”

“But why does she think that you and I are a couple? Everyone always says that. You know, Trauri told me that now that you’re here, people say we broke up.”

Finn can feel Poe studying him, sizing him up. 

“You know how you’re totally in love with Rey and it’s mostly okay that she doesn’t feel the same way because she’s your best friend and you’re happy just being around her?” All of this comes out quickly from Poe’s lips which usually means he’s nervous, but it’s said in the infinitely casual voice that he uses when he’s cajoling some poor idiot (oftentimes Finn) into doing something stupid and/or dangerous. Finn dislikes every aspect of what Poe’s just said: rapid-fire pace, casual tone, and the accusation, just tossed out there, that he’s in love with Rey. He can’t actually deny the accusation because it’s true as hell, but he still scowls at the vocalization of this huge thing that he doesn’t talk about. 

Poe’s eyebrows raise, prompting him to say something. “Fine, yeah,” Finn says, finally, glad it’s just the two of them in the quarters. It isn’t like he’d thought to keep something that huge a secret from his friend anyway. “So?”

“So…” says Poe, tilting his four fingers back and forth from his chest towards Finn’s. 

“So what?” asks Finn, eyes narrowing into suspicious slits. He doesn’t know what this is all about. What could his feelings for Rey possibly have to do with his relationship with Poe? “You saying you love Rey?”

Poe’s head drops, nose straight down and curly hair flouncing with the impact. When he raises back up, he has a frustrated smile. “Finn, buddy, I’m going to need you to be smarter than this, okay?”

Smarter, Finn thinks, annoyed. He watches the hand as it continues it’s back and forth motion. The light comes on suddenly for Finn, and he tells himself he’s mistaken even as the blood rushes into his ears, and can he hear his own heartbeat? Thank goodness for his dark skin because all his blood has traveled into his head and he does not want to look like a shining beacon of embarrassed surprise.

Poe’s hand stops moving, seeing that Finn has, at last, understood his meaning.

“You…?”

“Yeah,” Poe says with a nod.

“Ah.” A long moment of silence passes as Finn looks at Poe’s knee, just somewhere for his gaze to go than his friend’s eyes. Wow, this is...news. He rubs his hands together as though trying to get warm. “Right. See, that I did not know.”

He sneaks a peek at Poe’s face. He doesn’t look upset or expectant or anything that might be worse. He is just waiting passively. “Gotcha,” adds Finn, inanely. Then, after probably 30 more seconds. “Right.”

Why isn’t Poe ending this torment? He’s just quiet. That’s not even something that Poe Dameron is capable of, right? Poe is a chatterbox; can’t shut him up. But he’s waiting. Oh, is expecting an answer?

“Uh, you never told me that.”

Poe says, “You never told Rey.”

“Didn’t seem like much of a point,” sighs Finn, hands fidgeting on various parts of his body and eyes still shifty like he’d just stolen something. 

“Yep,” says Poe. 

“Oh.” Well, this conversation just keeps packing surprise rounds. 

“We good?” asks Poe, and the artificial cajoling is back in his voice, a pretend confidence meant to mask rather than highlight his insecurity. It fails miserably at this because after so many months spent practically living on top of each other, Finn knows what an actual relaxed Poe sounds like: like even his hair is too lazy to curl. 

Finn scrunches up his face with absolute conviction, eyebrows drawing in and lips gathering into a pout. “Yeah, man, what else would we be?”

“Good. You wanna look at me when you say that? Might make it easier to believe.”

He’s ashamed to be called out on it, and he looks at his friend, making the eye contact he’s been avoiding, and there he sees, for the first time ever, the needle’s point of hope in the umber brown eyes. Shit, has it really been like that then? Him pining after Rey and Poe pining for… him? He doesn’t feel worth it. Poe’s flashy; he could have his choice of anyone (has had his choice of anyone if the rumors are true). “Yeah, we’re good, man. You know you’re my best friend. Nothing is gonna stop that.”

A wide dashing smile crosses Poe’s face. “Glad to hear it.” He slaps his hand down on Finn’s leg. “So, mystery solved. You interested in a  _ good _ holovid? I know it’s not what I usually put you through, but there are good ones out there too.”

One mystery may be solved but now there’s a whole world of questions that Finn has, and he’s longing to just have that one. He’d already pretty much just written off their whole problem as Poe being a flirty bastard. Now he has to tilt his universe on its side so that he can put himself in Rey’s shoes and Poe in his. Does Poe really feel as strongly as all that? Does he actually think he’s in love or is it just a crush? What does the pilot see in him? Are there times when he just wants to reach out and kiss him? There’s a disconnect in Finn’s brain when he tries to swap them out. 

He studies Poe. His body looks much more relaxed now that the cat’s out of the bag. Finn realizes now, after the fact, that he’d been tenser since he’s been back, like he’d had something built up inside of him. Finn conjures up memories, the time that Poe had taught them to swim and he’d watched Rey come up from the water, everything wet, her face glowing with sunshine and exertion. He’d thought about how she’d taste salty if he kissed her. Then he flips it. It’s him coming out of the water and Poe’s watching his silly ass after nearly drowning, probably gasping like an overweight middle-aged man after a long jog. How could Poe think about kissing him then? Did he then?

Poe’s waiting for an answer, something about holovids, as though those matter right now. “Uh, whatever you wanna put on.”

They’re an hour into it, spicy moss chips in a bowl between them, when Finn asks, “How long?”

Poe shrugs. “I think it’s got another half hour. You wanna finish it in the morning?” His feet are up on a small table. Tiny dark hairs curl around the toe knuckles and this catches Finn’s gaze for long enough that Poe pauses the holovid. “You crashing?”

“I meant,” he looks down, embarrassed, “How long has it been with the…” Now it’s his turn to wave his hand between them. 

“Oh, uh, D’qar, when it turned out you weren’t dead.”

“When you let me keep your jacket,” says Finn, voice deadpan and robotic.

After a moment, Poe says, “I’ve got more than one.”

Finn does something he almost never does: he lies. “I am kind of crashing. You mind?”

Of course, Poe knows he’s lying, but he has the good grace to let it slide. He gets up, shuts down the holovid player, and readies himself for bed while Finn sets up the blanket and pillows on the couch. When Poe wishes him a good night, he hesitates before making his way to his room, considering, but ultimately leaving things unsaid. Finn doubts he’ll be able to sleep. 

  
  
  


Scinfina

The conditions on Scinfina are as night-to-day as possible to what they’d endured on Akiva. The sky is a light blue with only a faint trace of wispy white clouds and the temperature is warmer than on ship but not sweat-inducing. The inhabitants here, round-faced happy people half Hux’s size, sing tunes as they help distribute the supplies that the Resistance has brought. It’s perfect. Even his usual anxiety about being planetside is at a nearly undetectable level, just a light hum that doesn’t mar his high spirits, even with his dependence on someone else to get back off-planet. It could be the rare chance for physical exertion. As much as he prefers being off-world, he has to admit that the extra room to move around is good for the lungs. He’s ignored the potential assistance of droids more than once today, just so that he can feel that long-forgotten strain on his muscles as he lifts boxes. 

The shipment is small; Scinfina’s occupation had been brief, one of the more recently captured worlds, and there are much needier places requiring their assistance. The reason for the stop is primarily a PR pitch, as Hux had put it, much to General Organa’s dismay, but they’ve also been dealing with a nasty illness unrelated to the First Order. So, they’d brought down some pallets of medical supplies and food, for the less fortunate among their population, but mostly the trip has been about antivirals and vaccinations. 

Hux, uncomfortable even with the idea of providing medical assistance for juvenile, squeamish reasons, has tapped out just as much use as he can provide with the supplies, even going so far as to stock shelves rather than stab the natives’ arms. 

He’s tapping up his report on a datapad as he walks, looking up occasionally, when he spots Ginevra. She is sitting on the grass, counting one of the inhabitant’s heartbeat with her fingers, as though all the medical equipment on the short table beside her wasn’t there. She smiles warmly at him as he passes and he stops.

“Do you need a heart rate monitor?” he asks once she’s noted her measurements on a datapad. 

She smiles. “No, I’m amply equipped, Armitage. Sometimes I like doing things the hard way.” 

The native, a female of the species, shyly looks away from their conversation, as though she’s intruding and not Hux. 

“Sorry,” he says to the woman, and nods to Ginevra, conveying the same sentiment to her. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Ginevra is in her mid-forties or so, with streaks of silver that run along her temples and the middle of her head where her hair parts. He doesn’t often notice them on board with the ship’s standardly dismal lighting. Here they seem obvious and lovely. “How much longer do they need you?” she asks. He tilts his head curiously and she answers the kinesthetic question. “My patient line is dwindling and I have half a mind to take my meal on the grass as our ancestors did. Care to find me for a sorry excuse for a picnic when you’re done?”

He’s heard of picnics, but never actually tried one. It’s an exciting and pleasant prospect. He nods eagerly. “I’d love to,” he says, allowing a smile to reveal itself. When he smiles around anyone that isn’t Rey he tends to feel like Millicent baring her fangs more than a person displaying a happy emotion, but that will just be the way of things until he adjusts to this new form of social interaction. Ginevra seems to understand what he’s trying to convey anyway. “We’re actually done on this end. I think we’re just waiting on medical...who, it seems, prefers to go about things the hard way.”

She smiles at his snarky teasing. “Fine. You steal some rations and a tarp, and I’ll treat my remaining patients with inhospitable briskness.”

Hux doesn’t need to steal the rations since there are plenty for the volunteers on board the cargo ship. Better than a tarp, he finds a large scratchy blanket. When he pulls it into hand, a small pile of pre-packaged desserts that had been hidden beneath scatters. With cartoonishly darting eyes, Hux grabs one for Ginevra. So maybe he had stolen at least some of their picnic. He silences Brendol’s snarling voice. ‘Yes,’ he thinks, ‘I am behaving childishly. Better late than never.’

He waits a short while for her to finish; despite her joke, she’s giving exactly the amount of care that each patient deserves, as a good doctor should. She seems to know where she’s leading him, choosing for their picnic a hill far away from the hub of activity. There are flat red flowers that dot the grass, appearing more like a pattern among the green than actual plants. He tosses the blanket where Ginevra directs; he’s happy to follow her picnic-familiar directions, all the better so that he doesn’t appear as ignorant about the process. He does know that there are supposed to be baskets, but the Resistance is not a basket-abundant organization. He sits across from her, following her cross-legged posture.

“Well, this is probably the most pleasant planet I’ve visited in the last three years.” She reaches for one of the rations; he’s got the dessert tucked away, hoping to surprise her with it. The ration crinkles in her hands as she strains to pull the slippery metal tab that opens it.

Most of his on-planet time in the past three years had been on the miserably cold Ilum so he’s inclined to agree. He starts to work on his own ration packet. Much like First Order rations, they are a practical mix of fats and proteins and carbohydrates but with terrifying unnameable flavors. Phasma had been partial to the ‘spicy’ ones. He’d never been able to identify any difference other than an increased sodium content. They kept soldiers alive, and that was all they needed to do. He realizes as he bites into the oblong rectangle that he’s glad his field days are behind him. 

“Their illness seems easily treated,” he says, opening the conversation to include the rest of her day.

“Very. You and I have been immunized against it forever. These people don’t have native interstellar travel, so the First Order sped up their introduction to it.” She makes a face. “Did these get worse?” she asks.

“The suspicion had crossed my mind as well, but I believe our taste buds have acclimated to the  _ Observer _ ’s culinary offerings.”

Her dark eyes regard him cooly. “I reject that hypothesis. You are suggesting that we are  _ spoiled _ by what passes for food on board, and that cannot be so.” She picks at loose threads on the blanket as she chews. “I’m not even sure what I’m eating half the time, just what color it is.”

“Did you eat well on Corellia?” he asks. 

“Drank well, too. Everything tastes a bit more…” she pauses to think of the right word. “Well, I suppose that’s just how everyone feels about their homeworld’s cuisine.” Then, noting his expression, she says, “Not that you would know.”

“I have a homeworld,” he says without feeling. 

“You said you barely remembered it.”

Hux nods. “I know what the cuisine of Arkanis tastes like.”

“Does it taste like home?” she asks pointedly. She already knows the answer. He’d followed in his father’s shadow like a coward, allowed himself to be packaged off to the military like a virgin sacrifice. He’d been too young to remember much of anything about the estate on Arkanis. He can feel its shape, like a lurking mausoleum, but things like what comprised its decor, what company would visit, or what meals were served are lost to the fog of childhood. 

“As you said, ‘Not that I would know.’” 

Whatever scathing remark she’s about to utter is interrupted by a chime from his portable comm. It’s nice that they let him have one for missions but his lack of one back on ship is a huge inconvenience. 

It’s Rickman. “Hey Hux, just got word from comm - your sweetheart is back on board.”

He’s surprised. When Rey had opted to continue onto her next location without a stop back at the  _ Observer _ (which he’d had to hear from Leia and not firsthand), he’d wondered how long she intended to stay away this time, wondered how he would manage to stay sane if she went to all the remaining Sith locations without checking in at all. 

“Is she okay?” he practically growls, tenser about the spontaneous mission extension than he’d realized. 

“Comm didn’t say.”

“Right. Thanks for relaying the information,” he says formally before tucking the device back away. He looks apologetically at Ginevra.

She smiles with clear disappointment. “Thank you for the picnic,” she says. 

He fishes the ill-gotten dessert from its hiding place and sets it on the blanket in front of her. “Don’t flash that around; I did not come by it through ethical means.”

She smiles pleasantly at the dessert and then him. “Moments like this don’t come around often enough, do they?” 

He understands the sentiment completely these days in a way he never had even an inkling of before. He has to enjoy the blue skies and intelligent friendly company while he can because, just as easily, the next moment could be twisted metal, weapon fire, or the eyes of a madman with more power than Starkiller Base.

“Not enough by far,” he agrees.

  
  
  


The second day after Poe had explained his feelings, Finn had treated him distantly, like their interactions were painful, but by the time that artificial morning had rolled around on the third day, things were right as rain again. Even if they weren’t, Poe wouldn’t regret it; opening up about his affection was a long time coming and he has never been the type to steer away from something because it’s scary or dangerous. He’d taken his time with it only to see if it would go away (it had intensified) or to see if there might be any reciprocation and it was for that latter reason that he had delayed the most because he just could not tell where his friend was at. He’d been slightly dishonest when he’d implied that reciprocation was impossible because sometimes it really seems like Finn romantically likes him, might see him as an option if he gave up on his dream girl. But, a lot of that could just be explained away by Finn’s naivety about how autonomous adults behave. He’d just studied, and Finn’s always been his favorite subject anyway.

The moratorium on touching lasted only that 24-hour period, ended by a quick pinching of Poe’s neck, and eye contact is back to full and protracted (one of those indicators he’d confused himself with). It doesn’t seem like a forced friendliness to maintain a relationship, but a genuine return to normality. It’s good and disappointing at once. He’d worried that he’d destroyed his greatest bond, but he’d hoped to have planted a seed. Part of him doesn’t want things to just return to normal, but Poe supposes that’s the pain in the ass thing about love - it’s insistent.

“I think I should go back tomorrow,” says Finn. They’re both lying around on Poe’s bed, a little boozed up, just like old times. 

“Get back to mind tricking people better?” Poe asks with a smile. He’s holding Swingy, a plush woolamander that he’s had since he was a kid. Its yarny fur is looking pretty ragged these days. One of them is getting old; Poe would like to think that it’s the toy. 

“I don’t mind trick people. That’s, like, a dark side thing.”

“Yeah, but don’t tell me you haven’t tried it since you got the amplifier.” When Finn replies only with silence, Poe checks the defensive look on his face. “Wait, you haven’t tried to Jedi mind trick someone yet? That’s pretty much the whole point, isn’t it? I mean, Force lightning, cool, and Lightsabers, yeah, but the really awesome part is the mind control.”

“I would think that  _ you _ of all people would know what a shitty thing that is to do to someone.”

Poe doesn’t often think about his torture at the hands of Kylo Ren. He’s seen a lot, endured a lot since then. “I wasn’t meaning torture people, Finn. You could have tried it with something little like getting extra rations or making Kaydel quack like a duck.”

“She does anyway. That girl complains about everything.” Finn steals Swingy from his grasp, and the level of trust they have is the only reason that Poe allows it. One time Rey had fallen asleep on the plush toy and gotten some drool on it which he’d razzed her for a lot. “I don’t want to use the Force. It feels weird.”

“Bad weird?”

“Yeah.”

Finn’s just too good of a guy to want magic powers that anyone else would misuse. “You’re too good for your own good, Finn.” He shimmies his elbow into his friend’s leg. They’re at weird angles to each other, flipped upside down and diagonal, so it’s the easiest part to bump. 

“I don’t know. The Force doesn’t seem to make life any easier for Rey. I mean, she’s out there hunting down that freak, still trying to save everybody.”

“You think we’re just picking our teeth?” Poe asks, suddenly unsure of Finn’s point. He’s just boozy enough to be losing his train of thought. 

Finn gives him a look like he’s incredibly thick. “No. The only reason that everyone’s counting on her, though, is cause of the Force, right? I mean, when she was just a junker from Jakku, the only responsibility she had was staying alive. It gave her all this extra…” He moves his hands, Swingy flopping between them as he gestures for something incredibly big. “Burden. She’s calling it fate, but I don’t think it’s that nice. We care about her, but I don’t think that the Force does.”

Poe hasn’t really thought about it like that before. He knows that she puts her everything into the fight, and he and Finn have talked about her taking on more than her share in that way, but he’s never thought about the Force as this sociopathic mother figure with huge expectations. What does the Force want from Rey? Well, even if the universal power that binds all living things wants something bad for their friend, they’ll find some way to kick its ass. Poe would believe that drunk or sober. 

They stop talking then, just listening to the hum of the air vents, the occasional metal echo from the hallway. Poe’s drifting, thinking about the island plan he’d concocted, can practically feel the sunlight on his chest when Finn speaks again. “Sometimes I feel like if I have to spend another minute without being touched, I’ll die.” 

He looks worriedly down at his friend whose eyes are closed. Man, sometimes they get deep, but that’s some really emotional shit. Poe wonders if it’s because of his own confession, like, now they’ve just opened some serious floodgates into Feelingland. Okay, how would Finn most want him to react? 

With slow deliberate movement, he leans over and places the palm of his hand flat against Finn’s wide nose, engulfing a good portion of the man’s face with his grip. Dark eyes glare at him from behind the spaces between his fingers and with a smile Poe says, “I got you covered, buddy.”

With a slight muffle, Finn says, “And here I was worried that  _ I _ was making things weird.” 

“Oh no, that’s definitely me.” He wiggles his fingers, tapping the various smooshed parts of his face until Finn has enough and peels his hand off, an annoyed smile replacing the former frown. 

“Rey’s pretty much living with someone and I haven’t even kissed a girl yet,” complains Finn with an exaggerated whine. “We both started our new lives at about the same time. I think I’m not doing something right.”

Poe is extraordinarily good at being drunk. There’s some part of his brain that’s cordoned off from the intoxicating effects so that he has a crystal clear view of places where his behavior shouldn’t go. So, it isn’t that they’re both a little on the tipsy side that prompts his next question, but his revelation of a couple days back; with everything out in the open about how he feels, he’s got no reason not to ask. “You wanna kiss a guy?”

Finn regards him, first with wide and then narrow eyes. “You mean do I want to kiss you.”

“Yeah. You could do worse for a first time.” A kiss won’t destroy their friendship, not if telling Finn that he felt about him like Finn feels about Rey. That was make or break. A kiss is nothing in the long run, nothing but something that’s gonna make it that much harder on Poe, but he can live with it. Better to have tried and failed than never to have kissed at all or something. 

“That’s not why I said something.”

“I know.” Poe shifts his legs, suddenly filled with nervous energy. “You wanted me to say ‘It’ll happen when it happens and when it does, you’re gonna pick someone better than Rey did,’ that ‘the first time is usually pretty lousy anyway,’ and ‘until then you’ve got the best friends this side of the Rim.’”

“Do you just keep these lines written down somewhere?” Finn jokes. 

So, his attempt failed, not a big deal. His disappointment is bigger than he’d expected but certainly not world-ending. “Anyway, it’s not a competition. She’s her and you’re you.” 

“Yeah,” scoffs Finn. “Who’s that?”

“Whoever you want it to be, buddy. If you want to be the most notorious ladies man in the galaxy, say the word, and we’ll pop over to Keyorin’s Pleasure Gardens as soon as we’ve swept up the stragglers here. I’ll even shell out the cash for your first rodeo.”

Finn makes a face, obviously not liking the idea of transactional sex, either for his first time or in general (Poe doesn’t know which). Then, with a more serious expression, he says, “I guess I just want something to fall in my lap.” He holds up a hand. “Do not fall in my lap.” 

Poe laughs. 

“I guess I’m just having a pity party.”

“You do that when you hit the sauce,” agrees Poe. Finn does it all the time, actually, but it usually only hits his lips when he’s been drinking. “It’s fine.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

“Stay here and fight with us.”

“Nah, gotta go back. At least until Rey gets Ren. After that, maybe.”

Poe nods. He wishes that Finn would stay, but he understands. They all have their assignments. “Well, you tell her that I miss her.”

“I will.” Something is nagging at Finn, his face looks worried, torn. He carries his concerns in his lips. They push together in a pout when he’s got something on his mind. Betton says he’s got the worst bluffing face he’s ever seen. 

“What’s up?”

“Nothing, man. I’m just tired.” He rubs at his eyes. 

“Oh no. If you’re heading back tomorrow, you are not going to bed early.” Poe sits up, inspired. “We’re gonna ding dong ditch.”

Finn groans, but he doesn’t object, and when Poe climbs up out of bed, he follows. “They’re gonna know it’s us. We’re the  _ only _ ones who ever do it.”

Poe smiles. “But can they catch us?” Finn’s eye roll only makes Poe’s smile wider. 

  
  
  


Jusbrann knows a great many things; this does not mean that he is wise. He’d figured out who the man with the long dark hair was even before he’d named his target and that target, well, anyone would know her, the heroine of the galaxy. He knew the forces he was dealing with were practically demigods and the game between them one of legends. He’d gotten involved anyway, because “pay is pay” explained it all, even when the real truth was closer to his being unable to resist staying out of it. He liked being in the middle of things and not just because that’s where the big payouts happened. So, unwise Jusbrann, second-generation pirate (third, possibly - if his grandmother was lying about his father’s parentage like the family suspects), plunks his sad excuse for a ship down onto a desert planet in the middle of nowhere because he’s not quite ready for his role to be done. He’d gotten money for the deception and money for the coordinates, only you can’t actually give coordinates, you can just lend them out. 

It’s nighttime on the planet, but that doesn’t matter because the coordinates are a cave, and he’d be going in blind one way or another. By the eerie green light of a glowrod, he navigates the rocky hollow chambers until he comes to a giant stone obstructing passage. 

“Well, you’re in the way,” he says to the round stone. He pushes hard and it doesn’t budge. 

“Okay, no problem. This doesn’t have to just be about brute strength,” he assures the rock. He kneels down and rifles through his pack. “So, what I’m looking for,” he explains, “is a bomb small enough not to collapse this place. You see, explosives are tricky that way; you want them big enough to destroy whatever you need destroyed but not so big they kill you.”

The rock doesn’t answer and it doesn’t resist his adhering the small explosive to it. “So far, I’ve succeeded in finding that balance 100% of the time,” he says with several pats, tamping the wires that will receive a signal from the detonator. With a grin, he asks, “Let’s see if I can keep up my perfect record, eh?”

Jusbrann does manage to not kill himself yet again. That it’s only a matter of time before he fails doesn’t seem to have any impact on the frequency of his risks. 

The chamber behind the now blasted rubble is decked out in crazy carvings. It’s all Force-related, of course, because what else would the two most powerful Force users in the galaxy be interested in? “Check out all the magic symbols. Hey, can I speak to my Aunt Amite here?” If ever there was a place with ghosts, it’d be this creepy place, but even that he’d wager a king’s ransom on being lacking in the dearly departed. Still, he clears his throat. “Aunt Amite? Are you here?” When the old harpy doesn’t appear, he continues looking around the room.

There’s a raised stone pedestal with two grooved insets on the top. He runs his fingers over them, notes the lack of dust. “Looks like she beat me to it,” he says. “Wonder what they were.” 

He’d liked Rey immediately. She hadn’t been as grandiose as her stories but like a real woman instead of a legend. Hell, he could see something piratey in the way that she carried herself, an ability to blend when needed. She was naive; his story about how he’d come by the coordinates was clunky at best, but she was trainable, could probably be devious given the right set of circumstances. It was her instant likeability that nudged him into warning her that the coordinates were cursed, dangerous. Whatever it was that Kylo Ren had waiting for her here was going to hurt her. From the look of it, he could fit both objects that had been on the pedestal in one hand. Jusbrann knows well how small things can be as deadly as big ones. He hopes that whatever they do, she’ll be able to avoid it and outsmart the defrocked Sith lord. 

“Huh,” he sighs. “Worth checking.” He’s glad he hadn’t found her corpse here, some sad symbol of the crushed hopes of the galaxy, but it also confirms his suspicion that he’s out of the game. Well, with the money he’d made from this endeavor, he could find other games to shoehorn himself into, even if they would lack the gravitas that this one had. 

“Time to make trouble elsewhere,” he says to the room. 

  
  


“It’s just a foot.” 

“It’s  _ just _ an infection. Left untreated this could cause sepsis.”

“Well, it’s not going untreated is it?” Rey snarls. 

Trauri’s hands still, her sterilization ministrations paused as she studies her patient. This isn’t how Rey behaves, even as little as Trauri knows her. Fevers and pain can contribute to a foul mood, but this feels deeper. She wishes that it was Finn doing this; he would know how to cheer his friend and could help with the mental side of this care. “Rey, are you doing okay?”

The clip of boots precedes Hux, his face pinched tight with professional detachment. He slips back into his old general mode sometimes; Finn’s complained about it, pointed to it as an indicator that he hasn’t truly reformed. Trauri used to be afraid of him, even when he was lying paralyzed and traumatized in his sickbed, but now she just sees him as a tightass who is willing to do whatever he has to in order to save his own skin. She doesn’t trust him but she doesn’t hate him either. At this point, he’s more like a co-worker, and she keeps her reservations about his personality deficiencies to herself and Harvey; her husband accepts the gossip as part of his marital agreement.

“You spend too much time in medbay,” Hux offers, speaking to Rey, then nods to Trauri, acknowledging her existence.

“Not now,” growls Rey. “I’ll find you after she takes care of my foot.”

Well, that clinches that; she is not her usual self. Trauri sneaks a peek from the corner of her eye and watches the dismissal travel over Hux’s face. “All right, then.” He hesitates before leaving, obviously wanting to say more, probably to argue about staying by her side or to ask why the hell she doesn’t want him around. It’s anyone’s guess as to how Hux’s warped mind works. 

After he leaves, the tension in the room remains. She focuses on the wound, cleaning it, and bandaging it, and she can feel Rey’s eyes on her as she does. There’s something dangerous about it, like she’s no longer cleaning the foot of a woman but the paw of a wild animal. Trauri feels a bit like prey. It’s disturbing and infuriating, the latter because it’s happening on her turf. 

“You’ll need to be on antibiotics. The instructions are on the container. Don’t stop taking them until they’re all out.” She passes the squat round container to Rey who snatches it from her hand and sits up ready to leave. “For the fever…”

“It’s fine. I have meds for fever.” 

They lock eyes. It isn’t that Trauri hasn’t had unwilling patients before; actually, Rey is a terrible patient, always impatient and always embarrassed to be showing weakness. She’s just not used to feeling threatened by them, cowed by their anger. Trauri looks away first. “Since you seem in a hurry to get out of here, I’ll send detailed advice by datapad. Expect it within the hour.” 

As Rey replaces her footwear, which must be terribly painful given the angry tissue, Trauri adds, “Rest would be good.”

“Rest,” echoes Rey with a mocking lilt. She stands and stretches her leg out, softly feeling the weight of her foot and, no doubt, the pain from setting it flat to the ground. She hobbles to the doorway, but before leaving, she asks, “Wouldn’t it though?”

Trauri is worried.

  
  


Hux had forgotten what rejection feels like, having banished that sensation so long ago, but now, without defenses, the reminder is an acute pain in his heart. He writes about those hurt feelings, such a childish concept, until Millie crawls onto his datapad demanding his attention. She purrs loudly, bumping into his hand with her large head. He knows how baby Armitage would have handled being unceremoniously dismissed from Rey’s presence, and he also knows how General Hux would have compartmentalized it, re-shaped it how he needed to either continue dealing with her or to wait out a plan of revenge. For now, he’s letting himself feel, as Marshall always advises him. There’s no need to wallow or tantrum and he’s not going to shove it aside either. 

“I feel hurt, Millie,” he confesses to the love-greedy kitten. It’s okay that he does, he reminds himself, even if it doesn’t feel like it. 

True to her word, Rey does come and find him after leaving the infirmary. He’s only just finished putting away the datapad when she keys herself in. He studies her. Her face is red, the hollows under her eyes dark. She’s favoring one leg. Her top is loose around her neck as though she’s been pulling on the collar. There are no bloodstains this time. She looks ill but oddly alert - stims, probably. 

Rey tosses a container onto the bed. Pills. He picks them up, reads the label. Antibiotics. Wordlessly, she watches him. He dare not speak first. He’s feeling her mood out - the Force flow between them is stilted and he’s doing it the old-fashioned way. He can’t tell if she’s mad at him or mad at everything. 

“I’m going back out after some sleep.” She’s testing it, to see if he’ll fight her on it. 

Oh, he’s not fool enough to take on that rancor. “Hard to sleep with the stims in your system,” he says. A guilty flicker in her eyes confirms his suspicion. “You’ll want to flush it out with as much water as you can tolerate. Exercising can help burn it quicker, too.” Hux knows his way around stims, is still haunted by some of the hallucinations he’d had before he found his limits on how long he could stay on them. “Though I doubt Trauri would approve of you putting weight on the leg if it's an infection.”

“Foot,” she says. 

“Or with your fever,” he guesses.

“She doesn’t know anything,” Rey snaps. “She doesn’t know what’s at stake. You do.” Her posture is stiff, confrontational. She’s normally in some pretzel’ed configuration on his bed within a minute of passing through his door. She’s not intending to stay. She’s picking a fight so she doesn’t have to stay, he thinks. He just doesn’t know why.

“Nothing less than the fate of the galaxy,” says Hux. “It’s a heavy burden.” He feels the urge to fidget. Instead, he remains as still as possible, only letting his eyes roam across her face, her dramatically rising and falling chest, her slightly curled hands. 

“No one else can do it.” For the briefest of seconds, the image of Luke Skywalker flickers through his head. The former master of the beast could potentially do it, even if he seems nothing more than a scruffy beggar now. She sees the thought anyway, even for its briefness, and she bares her teeth. “He couldn’t control Ben before he turned. He wouldn’t stand a chance with him now. Not that he’d be willing to help.” 

“Then it falls to you alone,” Hux confirms. He may selfishly want them to walk away from the whole mess, but he would never expect that of her. 

Rey wipes at her forehead but her skin just looks red, not wet. The sweat will only come once the fever breaks. “I’ve killed three of the knights already.”

Sweet Saraboth. In the short time she’s been gone, she’d killed two more of the wicked henchman. There is no limit to this woman’s power. “And there may be more waiting for you at the remaining locations.” 

“He has to be. He has to be at one of them. I can  _ feel _ it.”

Hux can hear his heartbeat. She might be able to as well; it’s not that large of a room. It feels smaller with her in it, the enormity of her power and the tangible quality of her rage. This all sounds familiar. Kylo Ren’s search for the scavenger, his confidence that he would find her, and that damned force that they share. 

“And when you find him?” he asks.

“Then I will bring back his head!” she yells. 

Immediately, her bright red face pales and her eyes grow large and fearful. The quiet in the room after her outburst is deafening. She begins to shake and he reaches out for her. “Hux…” she says, her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Hux, what’s happening to me?”

He pulls her frighteningly hot body against him and wraps her up in what must be a stifling hug, but she quakes into him. He mutters platitudes to her, something instinctive and never done to him, words like “hush” and “it’s okay” falling from his trembling lips. 

He pulls her to the sink, dabs at her face with water, gives her pills to bring down the fever, and she cries soft quiet tears. He helps her out of her clothes, running the wet rag over her bare shoulders as her skin bumps up with the temperature difference. All the fight is gone from her, and the child-like trust in her eyes as he nursemaids her breaks his heart. She’s never this docile. 

“Did Trauri give you other instructions?” he asks.

She nods. “Sending it to my datapad.”

“I’ll go fetch it. And I’ll bring you back some ice to suck on.” 

“Thank you.”

He kisses her forehead. “You won’t be able to sleep right away, but we’ll get the fever down and the stims will flush out soon. Maybe now would be a good time to try the breathing exercises that Leia taught you.”

Rey slightly smiles. “You called her Leia.”

Her military rank had bypassed his lips this time. “Stop being clever, and ignore my faux pas.”

The smile widens, then vanishes. “I’m afraid.”

He wants to tell her that it will be alright. Instead, he kisses her head again. “I’ll be right back.”

She’s losing this fight and he can see his worst fear looming on the horizon like an unstoppable juggernaut. 

Finn’s so crazy with worry by the time that he gets to the  _ Observer _ , that he doesn’t even hesitate to ring the asshole’s door. He’s never been inside Hux’s quarters, hadn’t ever intended to go there, but the former general’s cryptic message: “Hux said to hurry back because she needs a reminder,” commed to him by Kaydel who had received it from Granna, is more than ample enough reason to get him to break his preset boundary. 

Hux answers, face as stern as ever, though there are cracks here and there, indications of stress, like the small protruding vein above one ear and the amped up focus of his eyes on Finn’s. He’s scared, Finn realizes. He preferred the days when he didn’t know Hux well enough to spot something like that, when the facade of snobby indifference fooled him. 

In a quiet voice, he asks, “Do you remember what we talked about before my trial?”

It was the first time that Hux had truly surprised him. Hux had been still paralyzed and sitting in that rickety hover chair when he commanded Finn to be good to Rey. He’d flipped the tables because Finn was supposed to be threatening him, telling him that he couldn’t visit with Rey anymore (which he has come to realize was way overstepping, even if it had come from a good place). But, Hux’s warning: that she must never join with Kylo Ren, had shaken him. He hadn’t even considered that she might be tempted to the dark side, but in his former commander’s face he saw the direness of what that outcome looked like. Finn had never looked at Rey as a potential weapon until that moment. He’d agreed to keep her happy, to always let her know her place with the Resistance, with her newfound family. 

Finn swallows the worry down in his throat, like a large unchewed bit of food. “Yeah.”

“We mustn’t lose her.”

They share a moment of perfect understanding. He’s not talking about Rey dying. He’s talking about her turning. 

Hux steps back to allow Fin inside, and before he can even step forward, he sees the woman tangled up in a flimsy blanket, face shiny and eyes closed. He whispers, “What’s wrong with her?”

“She stepped onto one of the knight’s traps. There was a chemical on the barbs designed to keep the wound from healing properly. She’s on medication, but the fever has yet to come down. She’s been in and out of sleep.” Finn jumps when Hux touches his shoulder, and he wrenches it away from the evil man instinctively. Hux looks as surprised as he must that he’d ever thought that was an appropriate thing to do. How much had Rey changed him? Hux, turning his eyes to Rey, continues, “Her prognosis is very good. She will survive, but it’s unpleasant.”

“Can I sit with her?”

Hux nods. “I insist.” Without a word, Hux leaves his quarters temporarily bequeathing Rey’s care to Finn.

Quarters on the  _ Observer _ are small enough with one person. Someone would have to really like their roommate not to kill them in this small of a space. There’s not much decor, which is reasonable since Hux hadn’t exactly had a chance to transfer his shit over from the  _ Finalizer _ . There’s a framed quote on the wall, a quote about compassion, which, yeah, that is not the first word that comes to mind when he thinks of the man who ordered the firing of Starkiller. There are real flowers in a short cup on the shelves where Hux’s few clothes are folded. Strangely, a loud shirt with flowers all over and emblazoned with the name Tropix Resorts in rainbow letters hangs face out on display in front of a cabinet door. The whole thing is weird. Flowers and compassion and bright tourist swag are about as far from Hux-like as Finn can imagine. 

He refills Rey’s water glass with fresh water from the sink, noticing the imposed organization of lots of toiletries in such a small area. Hux has holders for their toothbrushes, razor blades, and lotions. It’s efficient. The domesticity knots his belly with envy. He hears Poe in his head, “It’ll happen when it happens.” Somehow even the really trite shit sounds believable when it comes from Poe. It’s probably why he bitches to him so much, just to hear that it’s going to be okay and have a few fleeting moments of actually believing it.

Finn sets the glass on a fold out table beside her and himself down on the floor beside the bed. He watches her eyebrows furrow and release. After a few minutes, a kitten comes out of nowhere, sniffing at his hand. It startles him, but luckily, he doesn’t make a sound. It’s the kitten that Hux saved on Akiva, the one remaining one. It’s so small. He lets the kitten sniff him. Then, he carefully touches its head. It rewards him by biting his finger. Luckily, its teeth are as underdeveloped as the rest of it so it doesn’t hurt. He makes chittering noises at it and it investigates the rest of his body’s smell, his boots in particular.

“You’ve made a friend,” says a scratchy voice above him.

Finn looks over in surprise. Her eyes are red-rimmed and not as sharp as usual, but still affectionate. He laughs. “Yeah, can never have too many of those. How you feeling?”

“Tired,” she says. He believes it. He’s never seen her looking so crashed out. Damn the knight of Ren and his poisonous trap. 

“I hear that. I just got back from visiting Poe.”

“How is he? I miss him.” 

He reaches out, touches her head. It’s damp but not too hot. “He’s a cocky shithead as always. He misses you, too. Told me to give you a big old hug, but I think that’s gonna have to wait.” 

“Did Hux tell you what I said?” It’s hard to tell, since she looks so haggard, but he gets the impression that she’s embarrassed.

“Nope. Do you want to tell me?”

“No.” She rolls onto her back, eyes staring at the ceiling. “Tell me about the visit with Poe.”

He starts at the beginning, with Poe wanting to drag him around to everyone on board. He recaps games of Sabacc, lost ones because they were too shitfaced to win, and how he doesn’t know how Poe finds all this booze on the frontlines. He tells her about each holovid they’d watched, recommending one to her about a girl avenging her family’s murder. He leaves out Poe’s confession, though knowing Rey, she already knows.

“Poe has this great idea for what we can do after you’re done hunting Ren.”

She perks up a bit, and he gets the feeling that she was already thinking about Kylo Ren, drifting off to her own worries as he yammers away. “What’s that?”

“Oh, see, we’re all going to go to a tropical island and get day jobs.”

Her smile is soft, hesitant, as though she can’t even imagine a happy outcome of her battle with Ren, but she’s willing to hear him out.

He takes her hand in his. “Yeah, see, you show tourists around the island, big groups all listening to you drone on about how the volcano is dormant but it didn’t used to be. And Poe, he’ll take them out on little flights to see the landscape or maybe boating trips, whale-watching type stuff. And I’ll be tending bar, serving up little drinks with umbrellas in them. On our days off, we’ll get drunk and go dancing and practice our swimming.”

Now that it’s him painting the picture, he can see it more clearly. Poe is obviously a genius, because there is nothing better sounding in the whole world.

“That sounds perfect,” she says wistfully. “What about Hux?” She side eyes him.

He chooses to omit the volcano plan. “Accounting. Cause he’s an anal retentive murderer who happens to be good at numbers.”

She sighs. “At least you included him this time.”

“You didn’t exactly pick the most lovable boyfriend, Rey.” 

“Receive love early or desperately seek love late,” she says without feeling. Then she laughs. “Oh no, he has me doing it.” He misses the joke, but smiles anyway, glad to hear even the weak amusement in her voice. She rolls onto her side, looks at him with moist squinty eyes. “You’re wrong. I didn’t pick him, and he is very loveable.”

“Right, fate chose him for you.” He’s super uncomfortable with her trust in chance dictating her path. “You should probably ask it not to get you into ship crashes just to find you a man.” 

“I wasn’t meaning fate. I meant that it wasn’t a conscious choice to fall in love with Hux; it had already happened before I even realized it.” 

Finn is all too acquainted with not being able to choose with whom you fall in love. He’d excise his feelings for Rey if he could. Poe probably feels similarly about him. The heart makes way worse choices than the brain, especially in Rey’s case. “Did you know that Poe’s in love with me?”

“Did he say that?”

“Is that a yes?”

She reaches for the glass of water beside her and he grabs it for her. The way she drinks it down, it’s like it’s the best tasting thing she’s ever had. Fuck, he should have handed that to her straight away. “Hey, do you need to get back to sleep?” he asks, taking the glass back from her after she’s done and setting it on the little table. 

“Probably. But, yes, I knew.”

“Why didn’t I know?” he asks. He really expects her to have an answer for him. She knows him better than anyone else ever has, probably ever will. 

“Cause Poe flirts with everyone?”

“Thank you!” he says, gesturing with his hand as though she’s just offered up the one fact that he needed most spelled out to the world. “Yes, there! He flirts with everyone!” 

She laughs. “So, what happens now that you know?”

He shakes his head. “No idea. He, uh, he offered to kiss me. You know, since I… haven’t...yet.”

With each blink, her eyelids move up and down slower, and he’s not offended, because he knows she needs to sleep. He’s doing his job, though, reminding her of her friends and family. If Hux is right, that’s even more important than her battling this fever, and as much as he hates to admit it, Hux is a pretty attentive guy who knows his shit. “But, you said no?”

“Kinda. I didn’t really answer. It was weird, you know? It was… Poe.”

“I understand,” she says. He wonders if she’s talking about him now, about how she doesn’t think of him that way, or if she means Hux, or if she’s just really crashing now and he should let her sleep.

“We love you. You know that, right?” he asks.

“Yes, I know.”

“Good. Get some sleep. Me and your maniac will watch over you.”

She reaches for his hand again. “Visit me again?” It’s a big deal for her to ask. She never asks for favors. He takes it as a good sign.

“You bet,” he says.

He refills her glass again before kissing her forehead. In the hall outside of Hux’s quarters, he runs his hands through his hair. Man, he doesn’t know what’s going on anymore. He doesn’t know what he wants life to be, but he’s sure he’s in this holding pattern until they reach it. He thinks of crystal clear waters, Rey splashing him before Poe drags her under, warm sunshine on his skin. “Dammit, Poe,” he swears. “You and your ideas. 

  
  


Hux is stacking canisters with Betton. Each one feels light as air. The lights are dim and he gets the feeling that they’ve been working all day, but he doesn’t remember anything that came before it. 

“Kaydel radioed Rey in. We have to go meet her in the hangar!”

He’d been waiting for Rey. He is always waiting for Rey. He wants to run to meet her ship, but he’s back in the hover chair, the one they’d given him for the trial. It takes an interminable amount of time for Betton to push him where they need to go.

When they arrive, there are throngs of people around the  _ Millenium Falcon _ . They are the ghosts of the Hosnian massacre, all facing toward the ship, eager to catch a glimpse of the woman who destroyed Starkiller Base. His motionless feet dangle off the chair’s supports, nudging against the crowd, carving a line through. It’s not Betton pushing him anymore, but Phasma. 

“You’re not going to like this, Armitage. Do you want me to take you back to Arkanis instead?”

He shakes his head. “No, Rey is here. I need to be with her.” 

“Suit yourself,” she says. Her helmet is off, and her golden hair shines like the twinkle in her eye. She points to the ship. “Look, there she is now.”

It’s Rey, her face smiling warm as the sun, and he doesn’t understand why Phasma didn’t think he’d want to see her. She’s wearing her old Jakku outfit, and it’s stained with blood, but she seems healthy and happy. When their eyes meet, he sees something in them that makes his stomach clench, a presaging notion of something ominous. Beneath her smile, she’s afraid. Something bad is about to happen. He knows it with absolute and instantaneous certainty. 

She looks behind her into the Falcon and gestures with her hand for someone to come forward. The figure obeys, stepping out of the ship with long legs. His dark hair is pulled back, revealing irregularly large features, not many would recognize the creature. Not everyone has been tortured by this man, mask off, lips mouthing words not meant for anyone to hear but Hux’s mind.

Hux screams. The ghosts look at him, surprised at his outburst. He turns and runs, no longer confined to the hover chair. He hears Betton calling his nickname, and he can feel Rey touch his mind, concerned and checking in, but he continues running. 

He’s on the  _ Finalizer _ and he’s crawling into a vent, an enclosed space where Kylo Ren can’t find him. Only it isn’t Kylo Ren that’s hunting him now, but Brendol Hux. He has to be very quiet because Brendol is so angry with him, and if he can just stay here long enough, maybe he can wait out the worst of it. Hux quakes with fear in the small space and tries to make himself disappear.

Then, there’s something small and furry rubbing against his arm. It’s Millie. He can see her orange fur by the light of some sunlight peeking through the vent. “What are you doing here?” he asks the kitten. It nips at his fingertips.

The light is growing brighter and he feels a cool breeze. He opens up the vent face, letting himself out into a warm lush jungle. This is much nicer than the ship, much nicer than dealing with Kylo Ren. Rey swings down from a vine. Her skin is a dark bronze, and she has mud in patches around her arms and face. “Would you like to play in the jungle with me?” she asks.

“Will Millicent be safe?” he asks, holding the kitten out to her. It’s so delicate.

“Oh yes, we’ll all be safe here, and very happy,” she says sagely. 

Believing her, he takes her hand, and she pulls him and Millie up into the trees. 

  
  
  


On the third day of her recovery, Rey wakes feeling like a new person. The fever had already broken, but she’d been exhausted still and she’d been terribly rude to Finn who was beside himself at his inability to help. In the end, what she’d just needed was sleep because her head is finally clear and the drumbeat of the blood in her foot is quiet. She looks over at Hux, his eyes shut tight in sleep-focus. Her love has so many dark thoughts that swarm him when he sleeps; it’s a miracle he ever feels rested. She does what she can. For now, he’s not dreaming at all, and his body is fighting wakefulness, no doubt sensing her stirrings beside him.

His hair is growing so fast, much faster than hers, or maybe it just feels that way because she’s impatient to have her old length back. If he goes to bed without washing it, the small amount of styling product that he uses creates jagged sections after rubbing against pillows all night. One tress is resting on his eyelashes, a fallen tree in a forest of orange. He looks so much more delicate this way, all his defenses down, the bravado of general that he may never lose.

Sometimes she minds that others don’t know this side of him, sometimes she likes that this softness is just for her to see. She blows softly, and the hair twitches but refuses to abandon its perch. Then, his eyes open, the hypnotic green irises thickening and lids fluttering to adjust to the tiny amount of light in the room. He smiles. “You’re alive again,” he says, his voice deep with disuse. He coughs to clear it out.

“I am.”

He groans, wrapping an arm around her and pulling her close against him. “And that means that you’ll be leaving again.”

“You have things you need to be doing anyway,” she points out. He’d been keeping by her, in case she needed anything or in case her fever spiked to dangerous heights, but she knows that he’s busy too, useful to the Resistance and Leia. 

“None so important as your task.” He kisses her, close-lipped and gentle. “And none that last for weeks on end.”

If she can keep her leg from getting damaged this time, she’d like to hit both the remaining locations on the maps. She didn’t know how many Knights of Ren there were. She’d seen them with perfect clarity in her vision but she’d been too overwhelmed by the barrage of images, the stirred emotions of violence and fear, to count them. She guessed between five and eight. Possibly there were six, one for each Sith location. In that case, she’d missed the one at the initial coordinates. Had he been there, that sixth knight, watching her collect the pyramids? It’s a disturbing thought.

“It’ll be ending soon,” she portends. It sounds ominous. The expression on Hux’s face shows that he believes so as well. No doubt they’re both thinking of his nightmare. It wasn't the first like that and even after she completes her mission, either turning or destroying Ren, it likely won’t be the last. Well, as long as she survives to alter how those nightmares go, and as long as he keeps working through his trauma with Marshall and his journal, Hux should be just fine. It’ll take time, which they will have in abundance once the shadow of Kylo Ren no longer darkens their landscape.

She banishes the dreary thoughts from her head and runs her hand along his sharp cheekbone. His eyebrow raises when she tugs a little at his earlobe. “How healthy  _ are _ you feeling?” 

They make love, filling Hux’s quarters with warmth and joy. Afterwards, she showers off too many days of illness and even with how fond she is with showers, this one feels incredible. The crisp water droplets tap wake up calls into her skin. Her foot looks better, gel and pills working their medical magic. She dries it thoroughly before rebandaging it and Hux regards the procedure from his bed. 

“It’s less angry,” she says.

He blinks in agreement. Millie is on his lap over the blankets, her tiny claws working the fabric beneath her. Rey smiles at the kitten. “Millicent will be happy to have you back to herself.” His Akivan rescue has not connected with her yet, though she hopes that as the cat matures it will. She loves the soft feel of fur beneath her fingers. 

“We have fascinating conversations when you’re away.”

“Is that so?” she asks, feeling the water she’d missed on her back when she pulls her top on. She shimmies her shoulders, shifting it around to aid in the absorption. She always misses some spot or another. “Do you read to her as well?”

“Oh no, nothing that extreme. But I do tell her secrets about you,” he teases playfully. “I believe her to be shocked by some of your… predilections.” 

Rey rolls her eyes but grins at him afterwards. She’s got her pants on, and she’s almost presentable enough to go find some food and Finn. Those are the two things she most often leaves this room for. She leans down and kisses him. “You should know better than to start rumors about me, even amongst the pet population on board. I’m going to find food...and Finn. Would you like me to bring back anything?”

Hux shakes his head. “You’ll come find me before departing?”

“Of course. And before you suggest it, I’ll stop in at medbay and get an opinion on how the foot looks.” 

“When Trauri tells you it looks ghastly, will you abandon your quest and hide comfortably in bed with Millie and I until the First Order concedes?” He’s joking, but there’s a hopeful quality that she couldn’t mistake as anything else. It irks her. 

“No, but I may suspect that you put her up to that diagnosis if she uses the word ‘ghastly,’ she teases in return. “I’ll be back.”


	5. Chapter 5

Itoruus

The long delay brought about by her illness may not have been Rey’s choice, but its effect was undeniably positive. She feels more like herself than she has since she found the star map pyramids. There’s still something inside her that wasn’t there before she’d started as evidenced by the nightmares that flicker behind her eyes when she manages to sleep, and she’s still less patient, more prone to anger, but it’s better. Even her foot isn’t bad, her body’s natural healing processes and the bacta repaired the injury with a speed that impressed Trauri, whom she apologized to sincerely before leaving.

Itoruus, location Epsilon as they’d codenamed it, was a planet at one time, but through a collision a century or so back with another planet, became a collection of planetlets united by strong gravitational fields. The largest chunks still have breathable atmosphere, flora, and some, though simpler fauna. 

It’s stunning. Throughout the more compacted planetary pieces a blue glow threads between, a gas more easily trapped by the lighter mass. Then, as the rocks become bigger, more white mixes with the blue. The two most intact pieces (formerly two planets), still united by impact together, are completely surrounded by white clouds. She can tell only by their shapes that they are two. It’s as though someone cut a circle in half, stuck the round sides together, and then dropped it into a steaming pot of Betton’s fleek eel stew.

“Have you ever seen anything like that?” she asks BB8 rhetorically. The robot answers in the negative and asks her if she finds it beautiful. He’s getting very good at identifying her emotions; an impressive skill for a droid. “Yes, I do. The way the blue fills in the gaps there and there…” she points for it. “I would say that’s beautiful.” It replies with an observation and she laughs. “Yes, but Hux thinks I’m beautiful in a different way. One not involving planets.” Perhaps with time, it will understand nuance, but for now, BB8 still impresses her with its observant robotic personality. 

She begins her search where the atmosphere is thickest, near the heart of the collision. Landing is a challenge due to the thickness of the clouds which sit centimeters above the ground, and though it’s rockier than she’d prefer, the  _ Falcon _ arrives with no major mishaps. Itoruus’s sun is farther than either of Jakku’s, but it’s larger and produces more heat. The heat, easily over 40°, is something she’s accustomed to; the moisture-filled clouds that obscure her vision and trap the heat beneath are not. She’s reminded of the way Hux’s quarters get when she’s spent too long under the shower water. Still, as unpleasant as the temperature is, walking through the fog is exciting, appearing mystical, the uneven ground appearing as if from nowhere as she advances. It’s very quiet. The loudest sound is that of her boots on the rock.

She quickly finds the median, the point where two halves became one. It’s distinct, the ground colors and textures differing, and the line itself marked by raised ridges from the impact. She kneels and touches it. Through the Force she feels a sensation from the rock that she hadn’t been expecting, and she pulls back her hand in surprise. She’d sensed hurt. Before she’d gotten involved in the whirlwind adventure that fate had in store for her, she’d never have believed a rock could feel pain. Now, she knows better.

The line creates an obvious path for her to follow, but hardly an easy one; there are sharply raised cliffs that she must scale and holes as deep as two fully grown men that she must jump over, the land on the other side vaguely silhouetted in the fog. As she grows closer to the spot that’s calling to her, she notices more rocks that are floating mid-air. At first, they begin as pebbles. When she pokes at one, it drifts away as though with a breeze. Most are clustered, though some hang eerily alone in the opaque air. Eventually, the bits of rock look more like land, two-meter or larger chunks floating above the ground as low as her knee or higher than her head and everywhere in between.

She rests after the third cliff face in a row and pulls water from her canteen in earnest, replenishing the fluids that are escaping from her sweat glands in a hurry. Dry heat, she decides, is easier to exert herself in, even if the breeze feels cooler. The darkness of her destination is growing stronger, like a hunger in her belly. She’s not far now and she has yet to sense the knight she knows must be waiting for her. Let him come like the others; Rey is not easy to kill.

As she nears the spot, it becomes impossible to straddle the line; the planet on her left, the one with the purple clover, the one that she believes first bore the name Itoruus, rises too high above the planet with rust-brown soil. Veins of inky black curl like tentacles, growing denser into a web pattern along its horizontal face. This hadn’t been part of the planet originally. It’s foreign, a hostile invader, like poison through a bloodstream. 

It’s when the wall of sediment beside her is completely black that she knows she’s right where she should be. When she places one hand unwisely upon it, a story unfolds. She receives sensations from something without senses and images from something without eyes of the impact, jarring and terrible. The intent behind it is deliberate, greedy and jealous. Then, there are seeds of evil germinating, uncoiling, seeping through the soil. 

Rey feels tears prickle at her eyes, pity for this planet, this victim of intrusion. The smaller planet had craved and its need still flows through the ground wedged against it, claiming it for its own. The process is slow but determined, fueled for a hundred years with the need to possess.

She recognizes the smaller planet’s method. It isn’t so different from what the dark side has been doing to her. If Dr. Boccaree cut her open now, would she be able to see the thick lines of corruption flowing black through her arteries? Her empathy is rooted in their shared dilemma. She wishes that she could convey to the ball of earth that they are kindred. More than that, she wishes she could help, wishes that she could rescue the planet from its captor.

But she can’t just create a solitary intact planet where currently there is a bound fragment.

Or can she?

She adds a second hand to the cliff face, leans her forehead against it. She feels where the tendrils snake through. They run deep, at least a hundred meters. She remembers healing Hux’s spine, the criss-cross of nerves, severed connections. This is on a scale so much larger that it might not be analogous, but she must try. The first touch of her mind directly to the dark power within the rock zaps like electricity through her. She lurches, hands momentarily kicked off, and she gapes wide-eyed at the stone. Everything about the rot had screamed,  _ MINE _ with the kind of volume that obscured any differentiation between herself and the blackness. It envies with the same fervor that the deep many-eyed monster hates and the large wicked tree hoards the water. The dark side at these locations can’t give a milligram of themselves; they can only take. It sets them apart or puts them at odds with the life around them. Their grip has only tightened with time, be it the relatively short century of this rock or the unfathomable age of the hateful one in the depths of the ocean. The negative emotions expand out with their territory. 

She moves forward again, connecting with it, and the sheer want of it, the bitter unending hunger of it, confuses her. She loses herself for a time she can’t count, drowning in its want. Emerging is far harder than kicking to the surface of the water on Ivi Roit. When she does, she’s light-headed with the effort and the heat. As she had on the  _ Raddus _ so many months back, she asks the Force to work with her, but the connection to the light side is too faint here, too drowned out by the dark. Though she pulls with psychic biceps on the twisted vines within the soil until she’s panting and pain is streaking like lightning through her head, the light is too weak. 

Though it will take far beyond Rey’s lifetime for the planet to lose the battle it can’t fight, without her help, the loss is inevitable. The hopelessness of her concern breaks her heart. Just wanting to help isn’t enough, for once, and she hasn’t felt so insignificant since she was still a lost child on Jakku. 

But there is power to be had here, maybe even enough power to set Itoruus free if she’s willing to take it. A whisper from deep inside reminds her that she’s taken this power for her own before, but she stifles the reminder as she always does. She reaches out to the darkness around her, recruiting its dangerous aid. Whereas before it felt like trying to water a field with droplets of spilled tea, now she’s tapped into a waterfall, and the surge within her is nothing like she’s ever felt. 

Rey telekinetically pulls with a terrifying strength at the compacted planets. At the same instant, the ground beneath her begins to shake and a great wailing unheard by her ears starts up. She feels the invader’s resistance to her action, the coils attempting to tighten, but she’s using that same darkness to break the planets apart. The great grind of land jostles her but she clings on to the flat rock, her eyes unseeing save for the darkness she’s commanding. It obeys, but the task is immeasurable and slow, and the dark planet fights, greedy and unyielding. Her teeth clench until it feels like they may break from the pressure, and sweat covers her body and drips off to the ground below. Each wave of the ground threatens to knock her down and she adjusts her body as best she can while still holding onto the wall until she no longer can because the wall is moving away, drifting as slowly as though she’s imagining it.

_ What have you done? _ she hears and, unlike the fury of the planet, this is in articulated words in her head. It takes precious moments to extract her thoughts and it will take longer to untangle herself from the dark side. It’s mostly muscle memory that leads her to ignite her lightsaber. The fog around her mirrors that of her own mental clouds and she’s confused; part of her is worried someone has come to take Itoruus from her, remnants of the dark planet’s obsession.

“Show yourself!” she yells. The sound of her voice has a different quality here, either due to the slightly different mix of gases, the density of the clouds, or the dark tentacles writhing inside her soul. She sounds merciless, like Hux’s father in dreams.

A clatter of rocks to her personal northwest alerts her of someone’s approach. She wills a breeze, working within the Force to push the fog back just enough. The knight’s coat is looser than the others, dirtier, and his gloves and boots are studded with large metal teeth. His helm is patchworked with a long mouth plate that reminds Rey of a skull. In its right hand is an axe with cut-out notches. 

Again, it’s not Ren. Her disappointment rivals her dread at another battle. 

“I’m here for Kylo Ren,” she growls. She doesn’t care about these minions. She wants only to obtain their leader. The dark planet’s influence is subtle, but there, its effects slow as the earth which composes it.

The knight, who hadn’t paused in his long strides towards her, raises his axe. She widens her stance, ready to fight. It leaps high into the air, above the line of fog, and doesn’t come immediately down. Rey wastes precious seconds realizing that the knight has landed on one of the floating land pieces above her. She dodges just in time as a canister drops beside her. She has no idea if the gas that billows forth from it is just for obfuscation or is dangerous to inhale, and she doesn’t plan on finding out. 

She bursts some of the fog away above her, spots a path to a suitable platform, and takes several large leaps there. She can just make out his shape in the surrounding whiteness. He’s maybe four meters away, too far for either of their weapons, unless he switches to another canister. She notes that she can’t stay still for long just in case. The wind that rises is unnatural, and when he jumps towards her, she knows he’s also controlling their line of sight. 

The sparks that fly off their weapons upon meeting glow round like the aura of a candle, and she somehow has time to observe their beauty before flipping backward, her feet landing daintily onto a smaller bit of floating stone. She smiles, her acrobatic inclinations thrumming happily. There are hundreds of land bits here, some as small as half her fist and some as large as twice BB8. She moves easily up onto them, creating a path with the wind as she goes, sneaking up the knight’s side.

Her thrust misses, the knight already in motion to another spot, but he also doesn’t react quickly enough to retaliate on the opening that she left him. It’s a good sign. She follows and again their weapons meet. The sheer power behind the axe rattles her bones, and if he does land a blow, this could very well be her last battle, but she’s flexible, allowing her body to bend with it rather than to hold firm and be knocked off. The mask is expressionless, of course, but she feels its frustration as it bears down with all its strength. The force presses her backward and to the side, and she slips a foot wide and twirls, bringing up her lightsaber to swing at his waist while the sharp of the axe hits the ground where her saber was. It grazes him, his body springing off the rock he was on. She flips down with him onto a bit of land too small for the two of them, bombarding him with quick attacks, and forcing him to flee to another, this time higher, island. 

Up they go into the clouds, each of them altering the direction of the wind as needed. It isn’t long before Rey can feel the thinning of the atmosphere and she can’t seem to catch her breath between that and the exertion and the heat. She stills where she is on a half-meter chunk dotted with purple clover. She closes her eyes, reaching out with the Force for his location, and finding it far enough, for now, to let herself squat low and put one hand to the plants there. Her rasping and wheezing are disconcerting but the wet clover isn’t. She basks in the essence of Itoruus, and she can’t tell what part of her enjoys its peace. The knight is much higher; his species may not need the same oxygen content, and he moves closer to her on the horizontal plane. She stretches her legs back up, standing tall and proud on the land. She calls up the wind to blow the fog towards her, rather than away, making it hard for him to spot her from up above. He can still feel her, as she can him, but if he wants to drop in on her, he will do it blind or with another canister. She waits, her patience bolstered by the planet’s timeless presence.

In the end, the knight chooses an all-out attack, his heavy body dropping like a boulder from the sky, axe extended, counting on gravity to do the cleaving work for him. She hears the quiet whistle of air above her as he falls. It isn’t quite enough time for her to move her floating island completely out of the way, compelling it through the Force, but enough that only his body catches the edge and not his axe. He lands hard with his hip and it flips him around. His limbs flail as he attempts to catch another island beneath him. Whether he succeeds or fails is hidden by the fog, but she keeps moving anyway, hopping on little ledges until she finds him getting his bearings beneath her. There’s no need for her to make the same stupid decision he had. She creeps around, landings soundless in the white air.

She tries to make herself as intangible as the air, wrapping the Force like a cloak around herself, as she makes her way to one of the soil platforms beside him. He feels her before she can reach him, the mask turning to her directly, and she pounces, plasma blade first. He deflects with his own weapon. On his way to find other ground (she likes that she’s keeping him on the move), she again grazes him, this time on the leg just above the spiked boots. 

Their deadly game of tag drags on, minor hits from her and near-hits from him, but he’s outmatched and he knows it, so he keeps her high up where the air is thinner, in the hopes of exhausting her into making a fatal error. It’s a smart strategy, but she doesn’t flag, even when her breath sounds like the ventilation shafts on the  _ Observer _ , and when she finally cuts into his midsection, she could easily have gone on longer, hopping like an air-starved frog above the planet. 

She can’t speak, so she uses her Forcespeak, lightsaber threateningly aimed at his chest. His axe has fallen far below and he’s on his knees (made all the more painful with his spiked boots probably).  _ Where is Kylo Ren?  _

Rather than answer, he tries to get to his feet, heaving chest nearly impaling itself on her lightsaber, and she’s at a loss for what to do. She can’t let the knight live, but she can’t kill him unarmed.  _ Stay still _ she warns him. It’s futile because he can’t stand, his knees giving out a second time. His mask raises, hidden eyes locking with her own. 

The motion of his snapping the round cartridge off his midsection is fast, his hands already adjacent on the wound, and she might have missed it except for two things: the slight click as he triggers it and the flash of violent hate that surges as does. 

She jumps without planning the landing, and the percussive booms behind her propel her forward. She smacks into a small platform before landing hard on another. It knocks out what little wind her lungs held. She has just enough time to cover her face from the exploded pieces of land and knight. Honestly, it isn’t much, but she’s glad that she doesn’t have the knight’s bodily debris in her eyes or her mouth. 

When she does breathe, it takes all of her respiratory muscles. The sound of her sucking in air is nearly as loud as the grenade had been. She coils on the clovered ground and wheezes. Her heart feels dangerously close to exploding as well. With time, her breaths come easier, but she continues lying down for what feels like forever. When she does finally sit up and look over the side of the floating mass, she sees that there are at least three meters of distance between the planets, maybe four. She’s no longer tapped into the dark side, but she can imagine the invading planet’s rage. It had never had a name, never had any life upon it until it took over Itoruus, and now it will be even less, just a chunk of rock floating separate from the planet it so wanted to be. 

If it wasn’t too dangerous, she would force a greater distance between them, but it will have to do. She has, however, made it much trickier to get back to the  _ Falcon _ .

  
  
  


The day that General Leia makes the announcement that the First Order has officially surrendered, the sliver of Resistance members still on the  _ Observer _ creates a boisterous enough ruckus that it sounds more like Life Day in Galactic City. It’s a mad drunken free-for-all. 

Hux spends the day rotating between writing journal entries, reading Larompay’s seminal works, and dragging a string for Millie. His lack of surprise at Marshall’s appearance at his door (in full Marshall regalia nonetheless - where does he find false eyelashes in neon?) doesn’t lessen his gratitude for the man’s empathic timing. He gladly shakes the man’s hand, extending another to grip his forearm as he’s seen others do over the years but never felt comfortable doing himself before inviting him in.

Usually, they meet in Marshall’s office, though in earlier days, he’d come to Hux’s cell. It’s the first time that he’s visited since gifting Hux the gaudy tropical-themed shirt that he’s put on display on his closet door. Hux hopes that the gesture informs his therapist just how much the present had meant to him, even if he would rather take a blaster to the face than ever wear it. 

“Can I get you a glass of water?” Hux asks.

“Sure, you can do that. I warn you, Armitage. I’m not here for you.”

Hux lets out a theatrical sigh as he fills one of the three glasses he owns in the sink tap. “Yes, more people stop by since the kitten fell into my hands. I should have known you weren’t here out of the kindness of your heart.”

He passes the drink to Marshall who is still looking around, as though there’s enough in this room to occupy the eyes for more than one minute. 

“Your flowers are dead.”

Hux had brought the flowers up from Scinfina, smuggled them since there were proper protocols for that sort of thing that he didn’t feel like subjecting himself to the effort of. He should throw them out. The water formerly keeping them preserved with an artificial vitality has turned to sludge. Seeing their sad sagging forms reminds him of the beauty of that day and how unusually idealistic he’d felt sitting on the grass eating rations. 

Marshall laughs. “Oh, I know how much stating the obvious bugs you. I’ll try and refrain. It’s what we foolish mortals do to try and put you flawless folks at ease.” He takes a seat on the bed without asking, and it wouldn’t be him otherwise; he likes pushing people’s boundaries. Hux had at first thought it was just to push his buttons, but he now suspects it has more to do with being able to gauge the reactions to his behavior, a way to get closer to a person’s true psyche. “So,” he says with a slap to his knee. “How you feeling with all this hubbub going on?”

“I’ve been writing about it off and on today.” 

“Glad to hear it! You’ve been dedicated to that journal, and today is a great day to put that particular tool to use.” 

Hux would rather speak to Rey about it, or let her dive into his head about it so that he wouldn’t have to speak a word of his feelings, but he can’t deny that there is a certain power to reframing something into a bite-sized readable excerpt. Writing ‘The First Order is finished’ had just been writing a factual statement, and even if the words have larger implications behind them, the concept itself is simple. It may feel like his past was shot in the back of the head and disposed of down a garbage chute, but in some ways it breaks down to just those five words. The First Order is finished. Writing created a distance between the emotion and the true situation. It isn’t actually Hux’s former identity that was overthrown, but the First Order, an organization he’d been raised to believe had all the answers. Had he ever really bought that though, even then?

“Any tears?” asks Marshall, then, at Hux’s severe look, adds, “Or any other physical venting of emotions? Maybe some walking the halls or punching something?”

“The crew’s merriment has been a fine deterrent against leaving these quarters today, so no, no physical venting.”

“Might not be a bad idea. Eventually all the drinking is gonna stop and it’ll be as quiet as space itself with everyone all passed out. Good idea to exert yourself then, maybe.”

“I’ll take that under advisement. Well, don’t look now, but the reason for your visit is curious about the new voice she hears.”

Millie is brave but not stupid. Her movements get smoother every day, though he’s still wondering if her body will ever catch up to the size of her head (it should, if the pictures that Ginevra had provided him are accurate), and she’s staying very close to the refresher’s hidey hole as she sniffs the air. Her body stays low to the ground as it does when she’s hunting her string or her mousey toy, though she looks more like she’s expecting to be made prey. He chirps at her and she regards him, at first with surprise and then with dismissal. Her continued footsteps say, ‘You’re not who I was trying to find.’ 

Marshall is smiling, as people do in her presence. Even Hayfa, who views social interaction as akin to an equation she hasn’t been able to balance, had made childish noises to try and coax the squirming kitten in his hands to calm down. Millie has no patience for being displayed. She likes one of the giants and one only. Aside from being petted by that one human, she just wants to eat (she can never get enough) and, as predicted, destroy. Her claws are flexible and weak, but someday they will harden and then Hux will have a room of ruined objects.

“She’s so small!” whispers Marshall, hoping to not spook the snooping kitten. 

“Yes, the malnutrition has stunted her development, but Dr. Boccaree is optimistic about her long-term health.” Ginevra had said ‘If you free feed her, she’ll cripple herself with obesity,’ which Hux had found comical, though he’d kept the image of a very round MIllicent eating herself into immobility to himself. “If you try to pet her, keep your hand still in front of her first. She dislikes being snuck up on.”

“Not sure anyone likes that,” says Marshall, slowly lowering one of his pudgy hands down into the kitten’s sight. Each fingernail is a different lacquered shade. The silliness is lost on Millie as she attempts to decide whether to investigate further or to assume this giant means her harm and hide away. It takes several moments, but she does decide to come out further, probably emboldened by Hux’s presence. “Where’d you come up with her name?”

“Millicent is the main female character in the opera  _ The Brief Reign of Future Wraiths _ . It seemed fitting with her penchant for noise-making.” 

Marshall’s chuckle is soft, holding back his natural boisterousness. Eventually, she gets to his hand and sniffs warily. Hux wonders if she can smell the dried lacquer or if that scent goes away after application. She doesn’t recoil, but she sniffs around the side of his hand, unwilling to go beneath the hand lest it catch her. 

“She’s very cute.”

“Yes, she gets told that too frequently. I am worried about her becoming a narcissist.”

“You seem okay.” 

He is okay, surprisingly. “It wasn’t like I didn’t know this was coming,” Hux says. “With Snoke and Ren out of the picture, the First Order didn’t have a rallying point. They might have held out longer if I was still there. Or, I suppose that sounds like I’m bragging.” One of the things that his therapist does is shut his mouth when Hux becomes too self-conscious. Marshall just lets him ramble on, working through his own shit. He either does that now, or he’s too distracted by the test nibble that Millie gave his finger. “I’m not sure that the First Order ever stood a chance. Certainly, it didn’t with Rey as an adversary. But, I’ve had the shouts outside my door all day reminding me that it’s really happened. The Order fell, and yet here I stand.”

Hux isn’t offended by the kitten-induced delight on Marshall’s face. It’s nice that so many appreciate her. He doesn’t have many personal belongings, and she’s the only one that anyone would envy; it makes him feel proud. 

“I do wonder, though, if there isn’t someone else on board that could use your wisdom.”  
“Trying to get rid of me already?” The words are playful, not hurt. Millie is taking the opportunity to bite Marshall’s now antagonistically waggling fingers. 

“No, I meant a particular individual. Finn. He may very well be one of the drunken revelers, but the First Order was the closest thing that he had to a parent. He might feel its absence as well.” The look that Marshall gives him immediately leads him to defend himself. “Rey would want me to look after her friend in her absence. I would hate to let her down.”

“Uh-huh.” He doesn’t sound convinced. “She bites a lot.”

“Yes. Her species are predators.”

“I bet she purrs quite often too,” Marshall says with a wink. Hux scowls at the insinuation being made. He doesn’t understand why everyone is so quick to draw comparisons between the furry foundling and himself. “Let’s talk a bit more. I’ll see if I can locate Finn before I turn in for the night.”

“I appreciate that.” The promise relieves him more than he would have expected. 


	6. Chapter 6

En-Teska

The trees on En-Teska are far too thick to get the  _ Falcon  _ anywhere close to the place she’s going, and so she sets out on foot. The first day of hiking is refreshing with only concerns of brambles and steep inclines to occupy her thoughts. The small streams she comes across are drinkable, though she eyes the fish in the water warily, wondering how much such tiny little bodies can excrete. It’s pleasant, in stark contrast to the emotions roiling beneath the surface of her consciousness. As with every site she’s visited so far, the closer she gets to her destination, the more something dark inside her grows. That this is the last of the red dots adds something to the tension as well. If Kylo Ren isn’t here… well, she just won’t think about that. He has to be here.

The first night, she barely sleeps at all, her mind a torrent of fears and dark side whisperings. She’d hoped to make it to her destination before the second night, but here she is, side uncomfortably jammed by the ground beneath her thin sleeping mat, and wary as hunted prey. The flickering images that come during those brief periods when she allows her eyelids to fall are less like dreams and more like a madness, a mix of formless old tales and memories that she hides when she’s awake. 

In her mind’s eye, she’s handing Luke the lightsaber and he’s tossing it aside, rejecting her for the hundredth time, when she hears her name hissed as though directly into her ear. Her eyes open to the night around her, lit only by the ambient electronic circle of the night-setting on her datapad and the single large orange moon in its slivered state. The knight is here. Finally. She tightens the grip on her lightsaber, never far from her, cuddled close like a child’s plush toy, like Poe’s Swingy, and rises to her feet as quietly as she can. 

She can only sense his approach; not even a twig gives him away, but the strength of his Force powers is as noticeable as if it was a bear trampling towards her among the trees. He seems huge, menacing, and she feels strangely vulnerable, a small orphan lost in the woods. Lighting the saber will announce her location, but he’s coming right for her, and she waffles on the decision for several long moments before finally igniting it. By its light, the woods around her glow ghostly blue. Her trembling hands make the line of its powerful blade lurch this way and that. 

She can’t handle this battle. It will kill her and leave her dead body here to be eaten by the wildlife. She’s so much more fragile than they think. The unnatural fear reaches its peak when the knight steps between the trees and her body shakes so much that she nearly drops her weapon. The knight’s weapon is long and sharp, a curved knife at the end of a stick, like a scythe, but not any kind that a farmer has ever used. A whine hits her ears and eventually, slowly, reveals itself to be her own. 

The knight’s hand is outstretched to her, and she recognizes the motion as the same one she makes when lifting something. He’s doing something with the Force. She sees no incoming objects, at least not by the light of her saber. What is it doing? She shifts back and forth on her feet, ready to run or dodge. Her heart is slamming against her chest. She can’t remember ever being so terrified, nor so defeated before a fight has even begun. 

When he lowers his hand only to raise his weapon, she does run, tearing off into the dark woods letting her instincts guide her. She doesn’t get far before tripping. The lightsaber flies out of her hands, sizzling through leaves and tree roots before the sound and its light dies, leaving her on the ground in the dark...defenseless. 

The knight is going to get her. She’s going to die. She becomes convinced with one part of her brain while the other is still fighting to understand how things are happening this way. She’d been so calm before when she’d simply dispatched the knight on Ivi Roit. What has changed since then? She’d been poisoned and feverish, but she’d recovered. This creature coming at her doesn’t feel like the others, or her reaction doesn’t feel the same. She’s so scared that she can’t even pick herself up off the ground, which is an awful idea, because any second he’s going to be charging through those trees with that wicked scythe. 

It takes that happening to get her up. The knight leads with the scythe, parting the air with the curved metal and she runs again, swooping up her fallen lightsaber as she goes. She makes it farther, but a tangle of roots within a bush catches her. She manages to keep hold of her saber this time, but she goes down harder, landing in a way that knocks the breath from her lungs and jounces her shoulders painfully. She can’t keep running. It’s getting her nowhere. Once she finds her breath, she stands, turns on her lightsaber, and waits with clenched teeth.

She almost runs again, despite what she knows is best, when the scythe scratches along the tree as the knight passes through them. “I’m not afraid of you!” Shouting the lie makes it sound more believable, or would if she could just hold the lightsaber still. His helmet, arranged in a grid on his face, tilts to the side and he raises his hand. The terror that strikes her feels like it comes from within, but she knows better, seeing now what he’s doing. He’s creating the fear within her, but it feels like her own mind. It’s a whisper behind her eyes of all the ways that this could go badly, of how intimidating he is, of how pathetic she is in comparison. 

For a moment, she thinks of Hux’s nightmares. How sometimes, even with her intervention, his mind keeps crafting more and more disturbing imagery, things designed to attack him. When that happens, she adapts the situations: turning the sound of his father’s footsteps outside the door into the heavy stomps of a happabore, changing the metal clamps of the torture slab into bracelets that she’s bought Leia from a bazaar on Corellia. She’s been impressed by his mind’s ability to harm itself while he’s defenseless, and now she’s witnessing the same process in herself, instigated by the masked fiend before her. She can picture the scythe dripping with her blood, can imagine him chopping off her limbs like the knight on Hiegis had the snow creature, and it’s those scenarios that have her insides knotting up. 

If Hux was dreaming about his limbs being amputated, what would she change? Is that even a relevant question since she can’t change reality? She knows what that scythe would actually do. Still, she tries it, imagining the knight missing every strike. Her body twisting out of the way each time. The scythe wouldn’t be dripping with her blood, but with clumps of grass from his misstrikes. Slowly, the knot loosens, and he lowers his hand, sensing the change within her.

She shakes her head. “I’m not afraid of you,” she says, this time with less warble to her voice. 

The reach that the scythe has is incredible, but it’s not far enough when he swings, though she can feel its wind as she jerks back from it. Her weapon comes up, too late to parry, but ready for the next attack. He leaves his body wide open when he slings out the scythe to its full distance, and she notes this as the two deadly weapons clash, sparks flaking off where they meet. Her ground is lost with each forceful meeting, a step back at least, trying to keep the blade from going through her neck where he’s aiming. She increases her spatial awareness with the Force, knows that there are trees behind her, a grouping, one that would be hard to slip through. She doesn’t have much choice, though, because she can’t stand her ground, not with the length of his swings, so when he’s finally pressed her to the trees, she dives to his unarmed side. She hears the  _ shnk  _ of the scythe which happens concurrently with the thump of ripped bark, but she can’t see it, maneuvering herself to a wider space. 

His steps are so certain and heavy; his confidence makes her feel outmatched. It’s just the heavy stamps of the happabore, she tells herself, and finds herself smiling, even as the scythe swings for her head. The impact of her parry knocks her back again and her foot slides through a wet pile of leaves, and she almost loses her balance. He takes her distraction to stab instead, and though it’s curved, the tip is still as deadly sharp as the rest of the blade. She realizes that she’s been lucky that he’s been swinging, because his speed with the jab is too fast to knock away, and she takes it in her non-dominant shoulder. She cries out, retaliating with a forward momentum that she has lacked so far and he jumps to the side, dodging rather than parrying so that he can swing again instead. 

The knight’s body takes on a diagonal shape as both hands grip his scythe as far out as possible and his leg stance is still wide and tilted from his dodge. She sees the opening and she takes it, following his example of the short and sweet stab he’d given her shoulder. She pierces him in the exposed side, ducking at the last second into a low crouch to avoid the arc of the blade overhead, and to ready a second stab at his knee. It’s his turn to lose ground, as he guards his hit side and jumps back from her attempt to take out his leg. It still makes contact, but not enough, and she has to roll as the scythe swings down and lands in the grass where she’d just been. 

They circle each other, each guarding their injured spots if only by a slight turning of their bodies. He seems more reluctant to attack first now that he’s seen that she poses a threat. It feels good to have his body language acknowledge that. When he does reach out, it’s in a longer, sideways swipe, trying to expose a smaller area for her lightsaber. It also means he’s not putting in the same amount of force that was driving her back. It’s her that finally takes the lead, moving in closer to him, putting herself more at risk, but lessening his flexibility of options. She feints for the shoulder, already adjusting her balance for his compensatory deflection. It works like a charm, and she uses the extra force to swing in a lower wider arc, catching his shin. 

The scythe almost gets her by near-accident as he falls to one knee, but it goes just a hair wild, and she paints a streak of blue fire across his chest before stepping back, unsure if she’s incapacitated him enough to prevent a responding attack. The knight staggers, both knees coming down and one hand grabbing at his chest. She’d done it. She has plenty of time to drive her lightsaber through him, enough time to wonder if she even should. She can’t spare him, though, knows that it’s just too dangerous. When he dies, she feels both triumph and sadness in equal waves.

Rey turns off her saber and sits next to the body until the sun rises. 

  
  
  
  


Bradleigh Damarcar is exceptionally young to have held the position of Dean of the First Order Preparatory School (formerly the Imperial Preparatory School) on Vardos, and though this is the first time that they have met, Hux knows the name well. Their lives have intertwined over the years, Hux having worked alongside Bradleigh’s father and vice-versa, and he can immediately sense a commonality of sensibilities. He’s hopeful that this underdeveloped kinship will help to pave a path towards the approval of his proposal.

The man’s cherry wood study is enviable, indicative of a lifestyle that Hux was denied by Brendol’s austerity and his own military career. Hux can see with this level of cushy pampering how easily he could have become quite the pompous ass, though some would say that occurred anyway. It was having to work for every scrap of respect that kept complacency at bay. He doesn’t take windfalls for granted, doesn’t expect them to fall in his lap, and he never will no matter how generous the Resistance has been to him.

“Forgive the quality,” says Bradleigh of the whiskey in the blue crystal glass in Hux’s hand. “These are tough times to come by any of the essentials.”

“I’ve been living with the Resistance; any whiskey at all is an exceptional treat.”

The Resistance, even now in its heyday is still, at heart, a ragtag bunch of freedom fighters. They might not have many luxuries, but they do well at scrounging up liquor. Men like Poe seem to generate alcohol connections from thin air. He would never hurt for drinking options so long as he was willing to lower his standards.

Light-colored eyes meet his own, amusement glinting. “Yes, I was surprised to hear about your… organization shift for a number of reasons.” He finishes pouring a glass for himself before taking up a seat in the dark leather chair across from Hux. “Funny that we’re only meeting now. I feel as though I’ve been hearing your name my whole life. I’ve had the fortune of working with your father several times; I must say, the physical resemblance is uncanny.”

That is an undeniable truth, even with as much he would like to distance himself from Brendol. The green eyes with the slight yellowing towards the center, the mouth corners that turn naturally downward, and the trademark family red hair, are all evidence of his parentage. “My father was often accused, jokingly, of course, of having cloned himself. I’d like to think that most of the resemblance ends at my appearance.”

Bradleigh shakes his head. “Nothing to be ashamed about in the way he carried himself. He made quite a name for himself in the First Order.” His finger taps at his glass, a small tell that he’s more nervous than he seems. “Though, I didn’t have to have him for a father.”

“Indeed. That misfortune fell solely to me.” Hux would have liked to have siblings. He likes to think they’d have united against Brendol; really, it’s more possible that he’d have sicced them on each other like rabid dogs. “But I do have his name to thank for getting me this meeting.”

Bradleigh earnestly refutes this. “No, are you kidding? General of the  _ Finalizer _ , left hand of Supreme Leader Snoke? Oh, no, it is most assuredly  _ your _ name which got you here.” Hux forces a fake smile; no harm in letting this man think his flattery succeeded. It might have if not for the reminder of his old ship and the creature who had ordered his torture. That name, like Kylo Ren's, never fails to make him wary. “Not that here is anywhere special these days, not with the school shut down and traffic so eagerly monitored by the interim government. Now we are just a planet on the losing side of a war.”

If the Resistance was an actual external enemy, this planet would have been a prime location for occupation. As it is, the state of Vardos’s civics and commerce is more a victim of understaffing and confusion than an actual prisoner to a new regime. “But, we have survived the fall of the Empire, and I’m sure we will survive this,” says Bradleigh without conviction.

Bradleigh isn’t old enough to remember the fall of the Empire, but he is old enough to remember everyone around him terrified by their fallen government the same as Hux does. Despite its collapse, which occurred the year he was born, the fall of the Empire meant everything to Hux. As a fellow military child, he imagines it was much the same for Bradleigh. As dictated by the Emperor’s contingency plan, their families had flocked to the First Order, serving the new administration with as much dedication as it had the old, but they were scared of the change, worried that the chaos of the masses would flood over into every aspect of their lives. The fear of disorder had been imprinted early into Hux and his father had reinforced often the message that the only way to truly control the galaxy was by doing it oneself. Little wonder, then, that Hux became what he had, a shining token of his father’s principles of self-preservation, order, and duty.

“I have no doubt of that,” agrees Hux. “Vardos’s preparatory school alone is praised throughout the galaxy for its upstanding youth, and that includes non-First Order worlds.”

A frown spreads over Bradleigh’s delicate lips. “You speak as though that’s not something in the past.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

A dangerous glint enters into Bradleigh’s eyes. “I can already guess your proposition and my offense will come as readily as my refusal if I’m right.”

The whiskey burns nicely and Hux realizes how much he missed his nightly glass or two… or three. In truth, near the end, he was becoming more than a little dependent on it to sleep. He could slip back easily into that pleasant warmth in his gut and the fuzzy tingles around his mind. He’s only been drunk once since he’s been with the Resistance, and only then at Betton’s insistence. It’s safer that way, a rare occasion shared with friends.

“My values are not so entwined with the Resistance’s ideology as to suggest what you suspect.”

Bradleigh visibly relaxes. “I had assumed joining with them was a tactical maneuver; everyone did. Many didn’t approve, but then, here you are negotiating for them with only an ankle tracker and a  _ bodyguard _ .” He doesn’t even bother glancing at Poe Dameron, who Bradleigh finds beneath him, and who has remained, as requested, silent as a mouse this entire conversation, his back against the door as though he really were a bodyguard and not an earpiece for Leia about how he conducts this meeting.

Hux hasn’t thought of Poe either, willing to imagine that he and the Dean are alone to allow him to say the things that he needs to say. He likes Poe, surprisingly, but his escort is a glaring sign to Bradleigh that the Resistance only trusts him so far. He’d fought Leia about it, pointing out how it would look to Damarcar, but she’d refused to back down, saying that she  _ doesn’t _ trust him to negotiate alone. In her shoes, he’d have executed himself long ago, so he can’t blame her now for extending caution where he would have shown no mercy.

“I didn’t say there was no alignment,” corrects Hux. “I was raised First Order the same as you, and there is more overlap than you would believe.”

“It would be hard to imagine a scenario with less.” 

Yes, he’d felt that way, too, couldn’t wrap his head around why anyone would fight structure and lawfulness. He’d seen them as violent terrorists who avoided duty and sullied tradition.

“Despite being in opposition, many of the end goals remain the same; the Resistance takes different means to get there.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Armitage… may I call you that? I still think of your father as Hux.” Hux nods his assent. Despite his loathing of his father, the surname never bothered him. It was his by birthright, and it suited him better than his first name, which despite carrying the meaning of isolation and loneliness, an apt descriptor for all of his life but the last year, never felt like who he was. “What do you believe to be the largest difference in values between the First Order and the Resistance?”

It’s a question that he has mulled over many times in the last year, perhaps back as far as when he started aiding the Resistance as a spy, though that would have been a lower-level subconscious consideration, not the top-tier pondering he’s done since the crash. There’s no use in sugar-coating, choosing a value difference that isn’t actually the greatest because Bradleigh would see through it. 

“I believe that would be an emphasis on autonomy over duty. These people…” His avoidance of using ‘my people’ is deliberate. “Believe in the importance of choice, liberty over decorum.”

“That is a large value difference.”

“But not an insurmountable one. A fulfilled individual has more to contribute to a group than a fractured one.”

“Debatable,” counters Bradleigh. “Stormtroopers are barely people, yet they contribute completely.”

Hux speaks immediately, worried that Poe will have something to say about that comment, though he’s been obedient to Hux’s requested silence so far. “Accepted, but you would agree that the two are not mutually exclusive?”

“Do I believe that someone can focus completely on the self and still benefit society? Yes, I suppose so, but is it the most frequent outcome? I would say no. There’s an inherent detriment to such selfishness.”

“And are there no detriments to the utter prioritization of the group? Would you say no individuals are lost to the betterment of the cause?” He pointedly looks at the family portrait on the former Dean’s desk: Bradleigh with wife, Tenna, and three children. The downturn of Bradleigh’s lips either answers his question or reveals his disapproval of Hux’s insights into his private life, but then Hux expected that reaction. He knows as much about Bradleigh as Bradleigh does about him. 

“Next you’ll be asking me how long it’s been since I’ve seen Vinon,” says Bradleigh with disdain. “It’s beneath you.”

Hux hadn’t been implying blackmail, doubts that it would even work. The First Order doesn’t care who you’re fucking so long as you’re creating dutiful offspring. Bradleigh had done his duty, regardless of his sexual preferences, and that is more commendable than if he’d truly wanted to marry Tenna. “I would never mean anything so crass. I was referring, instead, to the things that individuals are asked to forsake for the better good. You and I were both molded to a cause, unable to form naturally. I apologize if my point came across as confrontational.” 

Bradleigh considers the apology and then with a sigh, says, “You’re correct. There are individuals lost to the cause, but wouldn’t you say that an individual lost is a better outcome than a group lost?”

“The Resistance has existed in some form or another since the fall of the Empire.”

“Because they had something to fight. With the First Order in shambles, they’ll scatter to the wind, choosing which other existing structures to become the building blocks for.”

It’s poignant, and Hux enjoys greatly the man’s outlook, even if he has no comeback, no immediate argument. He’s already seen many of the fighters leave, ready to return to their homes, and then where do they go? Not back to other rebellions, but back to a structured society, perhaps not unlike the one they helped to topple. He raises his glass to Bradleigh. “Well put. I need time to digest that.”

Bradleigh’s smile is a bit uneven, the center gap of his teeth too far to one side, but it’s genuine, perhaps the first real smile he’s given. He lifts his glass as well. “You’ve had good points, too, Armitage. Tell me about your proposal. I promise to remain more open-minded than your average Vardosian for at least ten more minutes.”

Hux wants the school to re-open. It’s one of the best, and many of the officers that have come from Vardos are the brightest he’s met, with the most well-rounded educational backgrounds. General Organa had thought him nuts when he’d mentioned it to her, but he’d elaborated to her about how necessary it was to have something to undo the indoctrination already in the society there, and bit by bit she’d come around. “Undo” wasn’t even close to what he had in mind, but it was the image he’d projected to her. It was also what Bradleigh had assumed he meant: a ‘Hey, we’ll help you get the school running again, but you must now teach Resistance values’ trade-off. That isn’t what Hux wants. He outlines what he does want - a school, not a patriot factory. He doesn’t want falsely imprinted allegiances, but a populace with the mental capacity to reason out proper courses of action. 

Bradleigh’s objections are swift and he interrupts often, but Hux has prepared for this for months, long before he’d had Leia’s okay, and he rebuts these, some with ease and some with shaky reasoning that he hopes to work out the bugs from later. The one that they keep returning to is Bradeligh’s criticism that a curriculum cannot be taught ideology-free, a fact that Hux doesn’t refute, but suggests workarounds for, ways to lessen bias.

“Education does not occur in a vacuum. Every choice of what to include, what to leave out, shapes a child’s viewpoint. They’re going to see the impact of the overthrow of the First Order and if it doesn’t match up with the facts that we’re presenting them, then all we’ve done is lie. All we’ve done is paint a galaxy that doesn’t exist.”

“Or one that could, but doesn’t yet,” says Hux, arguing by reflex at this point. Then, in a different awed tone, he adds, “You really care. The children were lucky to have you.”

“Flattery this late into your proposal?” asks Bradleigh skeptically. 

“No, sincere appreciation for passion. It reminded me of a teacher I had at the academy, actually. Baize. Her class on battle maneuvers was nothing short of brilliant. She had us spending more time looking at the ones that didn’t work than the good ones, the ones that we cared about. Her holistic approach affected greatly how I ran the  _ Finalizer _ .”

After they’d finished their second glasses of whiskey, Bradleigh had offered him a third, but he’d declined. Now the Dean’s finishing up his third, and it could be contributing to the looser body language, or it could just be that he no longer feels insulted by what Hux is suggesting, even if he has reservations about the details.

“She spoke here actually,” says Bradleigh with eyes bright. “You’re right about brilliant. I don’t even remember what it was about, but I remember standing in the back of the lecture hall thinking that I had never thought about her topic the way she’d presented it. I nearly asked her for an autograph afterward,” he admits with a blush. “Of course, I wasn’t dean then. I should see if she can speak again someday. If… we reopen. Then I could have her sign lots of forms and sneak her autograph that way.

“Armitage, I want to consider your proposal, but I have a condition and it is non-negotiable.”

Hux nods, trying his best to hide the pleasure that thrums through his bones that they’ve gotten this far.

“Present me a curriculum, just a mock-up. Make it comprehensive.”

“Me? I’m no educator.”

“Then meet with educators within the Resistance, but I want your hands overseeing it. You are the one with the First Order background and you’re Brendol Hux’s son. I can see you jumping ship for land, but I can’t see you tossing others off to stay afloat.”

It’s a compliment of which Hux is very much not worthy. To survive to see the rank he had, he’d had to throw others underfoot to be trampled. Surprising himself, he comes clean and then wonders if he’s crazy. “I cut down all the individuals I had to, in order to give the First Order the best. My days in sacrificing, both self and others, are behind me now.” He means it and if it costs him this deal, then so be it. 

Contrary to what he’d been expecting, Bradleigh laughs. “Now I’m less sure I want to be around such influential people if they’ve bred that competition out of you in so short a time.” He raises his hand when Hux opens his mouth to defend himself. “Get me the sample curriculum. I’ll only decide from there.”

“Of course,” says Hux. It should be the Dean’s job, or at least some school board, not a disgraced informant for the enemy. He offers up his hand and Bradleigh takes it, firmly and with warmth. “I’ll be in touch.”

He rises from the seat, the material making awkward noises after bearing his weight so long. The look he exchanges with Poe is curious, and he’s not sure what’s going on in the pilot’s mind. Before he reaches the door, Bradleigh touches his elbow. “I just wanted to say that I’m glad we finally got to meet. I hope this new organization works out well for you.”

It’s kind, something he hadn’t expected from someone so ensconced in the First Order mindset. “Me too,” he says, uncertain what more to offer.

En route back to their ship, Poe, finally unmuzzled and more than a little agitated, asks, “What was that back there?”

“That was negotiation,” says Hux dully, looking out the taxi’s window, preferring the moving landscape to the pilot’s accusatory face. “I would think that was fairly obvious.”

“I meant the stuff you said. You don’t talk like that around Rey.”

“I’m not generally negotiating with Rey.” Poe doesn’t usually get on his nerves. There have been a few times, usually when alcohol is involved, but for the most part, he finds Poe’s quick wit to be amusing, not that he’d ever admit that. Right now he just wants Poe to shut up and fly him out of here. He’ll have the whole trip back to the  _ Raddus _ with him and then the trip back to the  _ Observer  _ with Finn (the initial trip out had been among the least comfortable silences he’s ever shared with another soul), and he’d rather pass the time considering how in the name of the thirteen hells he is going to come up with a school curriculum. 

“Do you tell Rey that you don’t share the Resistance’s ideology? I bet that would go over great. Or that you don’t consider stormtroopers to be actual people?”

He glares at Poe. “There is no aspect of my ideologies of which Rey is not completely cognizant, and, if you are truly concerned with the lives of stormtroopers, might I suggest that you stop shooting them?”

Poe’s face, eyes narrowed into angry slits, and finger draw much closer to his face. “Listen you smarmy self-absorbed…”

“No, you listen. What happened back there was business. Damarcar is First Order, or was until two weeks ago, and I spoke to him how I needed to. I still will give my all for the Resistance, I still love Rey, and I don’t think that stormtroopers, with the exception of your boyfriend, are inferior.”

Slowly, Poe’s eyelids rise, revealing more brown and less ire. He also leans back to his side of the taxi. 

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that you love her,” says Poe with a slight smile, and Hux can already sense the impending teasing. “Do you tell her?”

He’s lucky that Poe has the Force-sensitivity of a canned bluefish or he’d be utterly humiliated by the man knowing how much romantic poetry he reads to his love. “She’s a mind-reader, you idiot.” 

“Yeah, but you should tell her too.” 

If their driver was biological instead of a droid, Hux would at this moment offer all the meager savings he’s accumulated gambling in the past year to get the taxi moving faster.

“What’s the big deal with the school anyway?” asks Poe softly.

“Preventative measures,” answers Hux. When the pilot looks at him quizzically, he elaborates. “A curriculum that prizes reason and truth over indoctrination so that the next generation can figure out what the real enemies in life are, not who.”

After a long pause, Poe says, “Call me crazy but I’m starting to believe that you actually have changed.”

Hux rolls his eyes. His transformation hadn’t happened overnight and the sheer amount of daily effort he has to expend not slipping back into his protective mode is exhausting. These freedom fighters with their healthy upbringings can’t even fathom what it’s like to try trusting a stranger when you’ve been taught you can’t even trust your family. 

It isn’t until they’re back aboard the Resistance ship and they’ve left Vardos far behind them that Poe says to him. “Tell me more about the school. It sounds like a good idea.” 

  
  
  
  


She’s close now, close enough that she becomes hyper-aware of the saber on her hip, ready to draw it if she sees any sign of movement. As it is, the nearer she moves to the center of the dark side mass, the quieter the woods become. No more does she hear happy birds singing songs, and rarely does something skitter near her footfall, desperate to escape the trampling giant. Even the breeze has stopped, the air stagnating, refusing to risk itself to cool her brow. 

Each time she hears a crack that is not the sticks beneath her own feet, she pauses, hand ready, reaching out with her senses. The trail she comes across is a surprise. It starts seemingly at random, a tree stump with an etching carved into its top sitting within a wide bare patch of dirt amid the healthy green flora around her. She examines the etching. It reminds her of the others. She touches it and her fingers tingle. She understands it. It’s a glyph for power. It’s so obvious now, the vertical line of the spine, and the arcs of blood through a body, a surging of power. 

The path beyond the stump is clear, with no overgrowth. Does this place have a caretaker, then? Or is there something inherent to the dirt that permanently resists growth? Either way, it’s clear where she must go. She traces her finger over the glyph superstitiously before moving on.

It’s easier, even with the incline of the hill, without having to create her own route. She could have arrived yesterday if it had all been like this. Her boots leave little grooves in the dirt behind her. She walks for another ten minutes before she comes upon the second stump in the center of the path. The glyph she finds there is less obvious than power. She stares at it, feeling the emotions behind it, finally identifying it as something akin to passion. It’s like passion and motivation combined, something with momentum. There are three upward points representing fire and a knot which she thinks is the heart, and from the center, a wind blows. The fire in the heart creates a movement. She traces her finger over it. She thinks of Hux the day he’d fired Starkiller. Fire and fury, passion put into action. 

A snapping sound nearby brings her head up and her hand to her saber, but nothing appears. Nonetheless, she feels watched. Let Kylo Ren come if he is here. She is powerful and she is passionate. She feels the glyphs like they’re carved into her instead of the wood. Her determination transcends her exhaustion and the mild pain in her shoulder.

“I know you’re there,” she yells. She knows nothing, it seems, because no one appears. She’s over-eager. 

Her discovery of the third stump is overshadowed by the shape of a building far beyond it. From here, all she can see of it is its domed top, but she shudders just at that. It’s a good chill that runs up her spine, haunting and terrifying but in a way she feels she can handle. She spares a glance, though, as she passes the third stump, and stops short. The glyph has been defaced, scratched out in deep violent gouges. With deep sorrow, she reaches out, strokes the surface. Who would do such a thing? What had the glyph been? Without the markings, the intent behind it doesn’t radiate. It’s a shame.

The last stretch of the hill is the steepest, and the rest of the building doesn’t come into view until she’s over the sharp curve of its top when she’s practically in it. It’s sand-colored, with patches of flaked off white. The dome is encircled by a gold band that glints in the sun. There is no door, just an archway, much wider than it is tall. This front side lacks windows. The dry dirt path that leads to it is well-worn, with grooves on either side, not deep or thick enough to be wheel tracks, just formed by the stamping of many feet. 

Rey’s lack of Sith knowledge is a hindrance. She’s uncertain how widely followed its teachings were, but it feels more select. Perhaps this place was a temple for another religion before welcoming dark side users. She just doesn’t know; the mysteries here are just that. She couldn’t resurrect Snoke for answers even if she wanted to. 

Beside the entrance on either side are wooden structures with squares holes near the top. She peeks first with her eyes and then with her hand, finding a pile of leaves and some coins. They’re old, and she can’t read the writing upon them. The temple collected offerings. She pockets one of the coins; she doesn’t want to steal from this place, but to take back an artifact, evidence, and potentially an answer to how long ago this place saw practitioners. 

The aroma of the place is incredibly strong considering its open doorway and abandoned status. There’s a fetid rotting smell, and burnt spice overlays it, creating a sweetness to the sickening decay. Living things have died here, probably long ago, but through the Force, that distance of time is shortened. Stone benches, run over with blackish green moss and orange and pink fungi, face a central altar. 

When the first scream hits her mind, she ignites her lightsaber, ready to defend herself, but it fades into another, and Rey realizes that it’s not real, at least not in the sense that there is a throat creating it. The screams of the tortured past. She bites at a twitch in her bottom lip, a spasm of stress. Otherwise, she’s frozen in this room, existing somewhere between the times, smelling and hearing things that no longer are. She concentrates on banishing the screams, focuses on the weight of the lightsaber in her hand to ground herself. She studies its contours and lets its hum vibrate within her blood. This is the now. 

She heads towards the altar, stepping over a decomposing tapestry lying in a heap on the floor. Its blues and yellows are faded, and if she picked it up, it would crumble between her fingers. The altar, a stone facade upon a wooden platform, is large enough for a person to lie upon. This is not a coincidence. She swallows her nausea after noticing the holes dotting the top, places for blood to run to. Underneath is an empty cupboard where they must have caught the blood in a container. It’s stained brown with the spills. She doesn’t want to know what they did with the blood. The screams of the sacrifices echo far away, banished from her mind but still here, still audible. 

“It’s barbaric, isn’t it?” Kylo Ren asks. He’s in the doorway, a silhouette, and she immediately questions the soundness of his presence. He’s blurry to her vision, masked by the plumes of burning spices around the altar, and she can’t sense him there. He’s as unreal as the body that has spontaneously appeared inches away, a young male of some species she doesn’t recognize, naked and perforated for ritual. 

“This isn’t Sith,” she says, stating what she’s already known. 

“Wasn’t originally,” he corrects. He moves further into the temple. He’s unmasked and dressed down untheatrically. His top has wrappings, like a short robe, and the knot is loose, as though it could unravel if he moves too much. It’s a relaxed way to wear it, so opposite how she thinks of Kylo who is wrapped up so tightly. His face is lighter, unweighed down by the sorrows of the galaxy, by self-recrimination and fear. His hair is longer, a small braid running along his cheek. Is this how Ben looked? No, he’s too old; Ben was still a teenager when he turned. “But there was, and is, power here.”

“The power of murder.” 

“No,” he says with a shake of his head. “You’re too distracted by the sacrifices to see the power of this place.” He gestures around them. “What were they here for?”

She can feel the Sith power, that throbbing blackness that she’d felt at the other locations, but it’s smothered beneath the red horror of the ancient religion that had practiced here before that. It’s a location of two-minds, both evil but in differing ways. The barbaric sacrifice tapped into something evil for a group purpose, a fulfillment of ritual for the good of a group. No, she thinks, something like that. She stares at the altar and suddenly she sees not just the offering, but the one performing the ritual. They’re nearly transparent, and she sees through the priest’s costume to the open-mouthed scream of the male. 

With the minutest of focus, the whole congregation becomes visible, and she feels their fear, their elation, their determination. They just want to live. They’re doing this because they want to live. Appease the deep darkness, they think, keep the fruit on the trees, keep the sicknesses from the chest. “They just wanted to survive,” she whispers. “They thought by offering it blood…” 

A tear she hadn’t expected tickles her cheek and she wipes it away. The image of the tortured man shivers with the water in her eye and as though by a trick of refraction, Ben does too, only when she looks, it’s no longer Ben standing there, but Hux. This Hux is not hers, just as the Ben had not been Leia’s. He’s wearing a white suit, but it’s wrinkled and his posture isn’t stiff. His cheeks are rounder, his lips in an easy smile. 

“It wasn’t all superstition,” says Hux, continuing as though he hadn’t just popped into being. “The power did keep the tribe alive an unnatural amount of time… those that avoided being sacrificed…”

She can’t stand to look at him, at this Hux that never was. Instead, she wanders to a tapestry that hasn’t yet fallen. It’s faded, but it depicts a scene of someone being dragged by dark curls into a pit. Artwork depicting some of the horrors that occurred here. It’s best, she thinks that the other tapestry had crumbled. “I thought I’d seen the worst of what people did to each other on Jakku.” She says softly. “Why do people choose to give in to the dark?”

She hears the sarcastic bite which surely must run through all iterations of Armitage Hux when he asks, “Are we going to pretend you don’t know the answer to that?”

“If it’s just for the power, it’s not worth it.” She’s lying and telling the truth at the same time. It’s true that it’s not worth it but she can still feel the taint of the dark planet that she’d taken into herself. How much had she traded for Itoruus’s freedom? What would she trade for an end to her hunt for Kylo Ren? 

Her Hux would stay silent. He would let her dishonesty ring in her ears until she could no longer stand it, and would open up, ashamed and asking for forgiveness. This one ripples and fades, its shape becoming shorter, rounder, until Leia replaces him. This Leia wears a loose gown, flowy, and her hair is adorned with flowers. Her feet, which don’t touch the ground all the way, are bare. Rey watches the transition with anxiety. The words of this place mean more when falling from her loved ones. She’d rather it stuck with Kylo Ren whom she used to pity but now seeks with a fervor unfitting of a Jedi apprentice.

“When you killed Snoke…” Leia begins to say and she interrupts, not wanting her to continue.

“Don’t. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Does not hearing it make it less true?” She asks her. She takes another step, and Rey worries about what would happen if this not-really Leia touched her. She might become transparent herself, fading from the world, or the haunted past might possess her, show her things she doesn’t want to relive. “Why are you trying to hide from yourself?”

“I’m not like them,” she lies. “I killed Snoke because he was kidnapping children and using them to kill others. I protected the galaxy.” 

How many times has she repeated that to herself and how many times has she heard the truth in whisper back? She sees them again, the line of every evil person who had ever harmed another, and her cutting each one down. She wanted to just keep going; it’s what they don’t know, all those people that praise her for her benevolence. It wasn’t a thin line between defense and vengeance. She’d crossed over it, leaped over it like she would small chasms while spelunking. She wanted to carve her way across the galaxy, remove from it every soul who had ever sold someone else as property, raised their hands to their beloved, stabbed an unsuspecting stranger in the back, left a child all alone on a backward planet… She wanted to obliterate them all. 

Another tear, another swipe of her hand. They aren’t lying; she is. She isn’t convincing anyone.

“Could you have killed him with the light alone?” asks Finn. “With detachment and peace?”

The temple reached into her doubts and plucked them up just as it has the images of her friends, holding them out for her to see. She hates this place for doing so. She glares at the flickering form of her best friend, sleeker and more muscular than she knows him and with hair in wild knots. “I’m not here for these games. I’m here for Kylo Ren.”

“Kylo Ren isn’t here.” 

“Do you know where he is?” The power here might know. They might all be tuned into a dark frequency she can’t yet hear because she hasn’t been fully consumed. So far as she knows, it hasn’t lied to her.

“What will you do once you find him?” Finn asks.

She hears her own voice, yelling at Hux in the tiny comfortable quarters they so often share, ‘I will bring back his head!’ Finn hears it too, looking around as it resounds off the walls of the temple. She shakes. “I don’t know anymore. But I can’t stop.” She’s not sure whether she sounds pitiful or obsessed.

“You must wield the dark side to find him.”

The Sith had sought a strengthening of the self, the tribe a betterment of the group. Both of them, running in sometimes parallel, sometimes intersecting lines of action and desire. The motivations didn’t matter, not really, because it was the fuel itself that was tarnished. The dark side’s rapacious appetite knows no limits, consumes everything it can. Had it protected the tribe? Maybe for a while, but not forever. The dark side hadn’t saved the evil Emperor nor Darth Vader. 

“It can’t be wielded,” she says. 

“Not indefinitely.” Its appearance is now Han Solo and her grief surfaces as she tears her eyes off of him. They’d only known each other a brief moment, but it had meant the world to her.

“Not ever. It’s a fool’s bargain, right from the beginning. I’ve been making myself its conduit. It’s been feeding off of me and changing me. That’s what it did to Kylo Ren.” Even seeing it as clearly as she does, she believes that Snoke would never have fallen if she hadn’t reached out for that control. She wouldn’t take it back, because it needed to be done, and isn’t that what these priests thought? Justifications for evil. 

“If you want to find him, if you want to defeat him, you will need it,” says Han. 

“Tell me,” she orders, ignoring the warning screams in her head and the faint screams of the ancient dead.

“There is another location. Focus with what’s already within you to see it.” 

She begins to ask it more, her mouth open, unsure how to articulate her question, but it’s gone. She looks around her, and the congregation, the sacrifice, the priest, have all evaporated into nothing. The air is quiet and still, and the reek of decaying plant matter and dampness has replaced the smell of rotting flesh. The temple has conveyed what it wanted and is now done with her.

Before leaving, she searches the area around the temple. She finds more glyph-marked stumps, but she doesn’t touch them, suddenly afraid of the emotional impact they have. For the briefest of moments, she considers setting her blaster to the building, but she couldn’t, not even if this place doesn’t deserve to be remembered. She imagines it swallowed up in a huge fire, the screams of the already deceased crying out above the roar of the flames. She’s afraid if she doesn’t destroy it, that she will bring some of it with her, but then, she knows that she already is, something more destructive than the coin in her pocket.

  
  
  


“I see she missed you,” says Ginevra with a smile. “It was like pouring food into a haunted dish; it just magically disappeared, but without a trace of her. She doesn’t drink as much water as I’d like; we may want to increase her wet food portions.” 

Hux is delightfully unguarded, and it’s impossible not to find the way he lavishes affection on the speck of a cat adorable beyond measure. Its small orange body could fit in one of his hands, but he’s got both cupped around it like the cat is a priceless treasure, and he’s inexperienced with kittens enough to have his nose right up to its face. So far, though, Millicent is just loving him back, her purr disproportionate to her body size as she rubs her cheeks against his nose and lips.

“She licks condensation rings,” offers Hux. “That might add to her hydration.”

He’s still dressed smartly in someone’s borrowed clothes; remnants of whatever mission he’d gone off on (a diplomatic one if the garb is any indication), and the cuffs of his sleeves are unbuttoned allowing Millicent to lick his exposed wrist. She watches the father-daughter reunion until he notices her fond stare and clears his throat, lowering the kitten to the ground. Immediate meows begin, as the kitten begs to be lifted again, her tiny paws on Hux’s ankle.

Hux laughs. It’s a sweet rare sound. “Millie, you’re going to have to learn independence.” To Ginevra, he offers an embarrassed expression as he reaches down and scoops the kitten back up, proving himself a poor disciplinarian. “I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.”

“Not at all. One of these days you’ll have to return the favor and babysit Arun.” She’s teasing, and he seems to know it, though he’s wary that she’s not. It isn’t that she doesn’t trust the war criminal to look after her son, but she is well aware that he has no experience with children. She would have expected the man to have no paternal instinct, but the nurturing display she’d just witnessed says otherwise. She hopes for the child’s sake that Hux never has kids, no matter how good he could be with them; his legacy would ruin that child irreparably. “Was it a productive trip?”

Hux runs his fingers through his hair, a gesture she can’t recall seeing him make before, and the hairs snap back into place like perfect soldiers. “I think so, though time will tell. I should report to the general, but…”

He’s interrupted by the chime of the door to his quarters. Millicent squirms in abject terror and he sets her gently down before admitting in Betton, the big bear of a man who once served as Hux’s guard. “Hey Doctor,” he greets with a bearded smile. The corners of his eyes squish pleasantly into happy wrinkles. He’s a kind man, and a forgiving one, making him an ideal candidate for a friend of Hux’s. 

“Hello,” she greets with a nod. 

With the new addition, the room feels much smaller, and she presses herself closer to the wall. Her hair, which is swept into a bun, bumps the frame behind her head, but luckily not hard enough to dislodge it. 

“Heard you got back in and thought I’d see how things went. Hey, don’t you look fancy!”

Hux looks down at himself, as though he’d forgotten the formal attire. “Ah yes, it turns out I’m actually quite similar in size to Rickman.”

“He seems so much bigger than you,” puzzles Betton. “Maybe it’s just cause he’s got so much personality.”

Ginevra can’t stop the smirk on her face, especially when Hux’s lips twitch a bit as well. “Yes, well, that may well be.” Betton had meant no offense and their friend is not easily insulted. “However, we are of similar frames, which made him an ideal candidate to lend me the outfit.”

“It looks good.” 

“I agree,” she says. “Your usual hand-me-downs are more loose-fitting.”

Hux nods. “I’m at the mercy of generosity.” He crosses his arms over himself self-consciously. “The trip was beneficial. As for if it was a success, time will tell. I do have a homework assignment of sorts. I might as well ask you both first since you’re here. Do you know if there are any former educators among our ranks here on the  _ Observer _ ?”

“Educators?” asks Betton. 

Ginevra had TA’ed as part of her doctoral program, but she’d been more of a glorified gofer than playing a part in the teaching, so she doesn’t offer this. Instead, she says, “Both Hayfa and Rolli ran science classes for children, a non-profit supplemental program. Kenner in Ops… they were either in training to be a teacher or they were a teacher for a while; I can’t remember which.”

“Luke Skywalker ran a Jedi training camp,” says Betton. Then, when they both stare at him, he asks, “What?”

The mysterious Jedi figure on board keeps to himself, and there’s probably more wild speculation than actual known backstory, but it’s more than likely that the story of it being Luke who taught Kylo Ren to use his powers is true. Ginevra guesses that with his inside track into matters involving Leia, Hux knows far more than she, and his stunned expression helps to validate her own. 

“I can’t ask Luke Skywalker,” hisses Hux.

“Well, he’s Leia’s brother, so I don’t know why not. Damn, Chance, you might not have any better options than someone like that. If he’s anything like Leia, he’d probably be happy to help.”

“I don’t think he’s anything like General Organa,” says Ginevra. 

“He is kinda...closed off. Still, I wouldn’t rule him out just cause he’s a legend.” Betton takes people as they come without the assumptions that others would put on them. It’s both admirable and naive. 

“Well, all the same, I’d rather approach Hayfa first. She plays board games down in the rec room, though. Keen mind. Rolli is her mate, correct?” Hux asks. “I’m not sure I’ve met him. ”

“If I think of more, I’ll be sure to let you know. As for now, I should probably return my attention to some of my own homework.”

It’s always hard to leave Hux’s company; she finds him less exhausting to be around than nearly anyone else. He follows her lines of thinking without needing explanations, and he has no qualms about sitting in silence with her when her mood is more introspective. Betton’s intrusion helps. 

“Thank you again for looking after Millicent. I would have had to rely on Betton otherwise,” jokes Hux.

“And I wouldn’t have given her back.” 

“I’ll see you both later,” Ginevra says with a nod to each. She’ll miss this camaraderie. Soon she and Arun will be back on Corellia under her mother’s watchful eye once again. It’s hard to make friends for her. She’s not naturally a warm person, and then there’s all the time that she spends with patients when she should be spending it at parties or other social gatherings she feels too awkward for. She’ll try harder though, because she has enjoyed the community on the  _ Raddus  _ and the  _ Observer _ , and she doesn’t want to return to the lonely place she was before. If Hux didn’t have Rey she might have invited him to stay on Corellia on her mother’s estate, though logistically it would be a nightmare; friend or not to her, he was still the man who had blown up an entire system. For his protection, he’ll need to stay by Rey’s side or head to the Outer Rim, and he’s shown no indication of being at all unhappy with his romantic relationship. ‘If he didn’t have Rey’ passes too often through her head, and since she’s a realist, she tries to shut down the thought process that follows. Wishing didn’t get her through medical school, didn’t provide Arun with the medical treatment he needed; hard work had done that. Wishing is for warrior women with magical Force powers, not antisocial Corellian doctors. 

Rey pulls the star map pyramids from her satchel with dirty hands. BB8 rolls curiously behind her, following into a larger part of the  _ Falcon. _ The lights are already low, but she dims them more before illuminating the pyramid still marked with bandage adhesive. BB8 chirps as the dots cover everything, just an exclamation of appreciation. 

“BB8, how many of the red dots do you see?”

It counts six, as R2D2 had before. Its little head whirls around, diligently recounting when it sees her disappointment, but it comes up with the same number again.

“That’s alright. I think I have to be the one to find it. I’m going to have to focus.” What she means is that she has to do something incredibly stupid to find it, but it won’t know otherwise. The concept of lying is far beyond even the incredibly clever droid’s programming. 

She sits down in a cross-legged position and stares at the dots. She’s never tried to tap into the dark side without a source near her, and even with as full as her heart feels of it, she can’t find it by her usual light side method of clearing her mind, sitting still, and being peaceful. It takes twenty long minutes of attempted meditation to realize that, and she kicks out one foot in a small tantrum when she does. 

“It’s not going to work,” she mutters. The Jedis find that balance through calm, so maybe she needs to do the opposite. “Stay in that corner, okay?” she asks BB8. When she returns with the scythe, it has obeyed her, compacting itself against the wall.

She draws a deep breath and then swings the former knight’s weapon. Her staff, with its versatility and length, is perfect for her fighting style. The scythe is another beast altogether. Its blade vibrates for maximal damage and though the sensation is muffled by the long handle portion, it still leaves her hands feeling jittery. It’s clunky. Even in the knight’s hands, it hadn’t flowed with the smoothness that her staff affords her. She remembers how the battle had gone on En-Teska, reproduces his movements, trying to channel the hatred in each swing, the arrogance. She sees herself, scared and running, and the resentment of that image is good, makes her want to lash out. He made her feel like prey, and it must have made him feel more predator. She whirls in the open area, trying to catch her own imaginary throat. 

She does, spearing the sharp vibrating tip through, and delighting as the blood burbles up from her throat. Good. No more savior of the galaxy. No more martyr with her cause. If she kills this Rey, could she do what she wants? Could she leave the non-Force sensitives to fight their own battles?

She tosses down the weapon, and looks again, this time upright and hands ready to fight. All the dots look white no matter how long she stares. Her shoulder hurts. She raises up a hand and finds that she’s soaked through her bandage, re-opening the wound that she’d covered with bacta and bandages from the small medkit in her satchel the previous day. A memory flits through her mind, Kylo Ren pounding on the wound at his side, and before she can overthink it, she pushes her fingers into the bandage covering the hole left by the knight’s weapon. Her vision flashes red. 

Yes, she thinks, let the red come. She rips off the bloody bandage, and curls her finger in, digging deep into her flesh. BB8 rolls from the corner, concerned robotic noises questioning her actions, and she raises up a hand for him to stop. It hurts like hell, the ache turning from dull to tearing, and it’s good, brings her mental clarity. All she can think about is the pain and the anger that she’s having to do this at all.

The blood drips onto the floor of the ship, and Rey smiles. It can’t be the first time that the  _ Falcon _ has worn the pilot’s blood. A flickering catches her eye, and she looks, one of the dots is pulsing. Another one does, and then another. They’re the dark side locations. One, two… she counts seven. 

“BB8! Which planet is this?” she asks, pointing to one of the dots with a blood-red finger. It tells her Ivi Roit. She cackles and it sounds crazy. 

One of the planets pulses more than the others, and she points to it next. “And what’s this one?” The droid whistles in confusion. “This one! The one I’m pointing to!” When it continues to question her, she yells, “Come on you stupid machine! Right here!”

It rolls backward defensively and Rey swallows hard, her words lingering in the air. “I’m sorry. Look, can you not see this one?”

It shakes its alarmed little head. “Can you still tell me the planet that’s in this spot, even without seeing it?” It turns out that BB8 doesn’t know of a planet there, but he is able to tell her the coordinates. That’s enough. “BB8, I need you to do me a favor. I want you to transmit these coordinates to Leia. Tell her that’s where Ren is, and that’s where I’m going.”

It agrees to do so and beeps worriedly at her. “No, I’m not going to talk to her. I’ll talk to her after we’ve finished this...one way or another.” She swipes a finger through the blood running down her arm. She’s going to have to clean this up. Blood on an altar with holes. She’s walking a dark path. She has to. No one else can do this. 


	7. Chapter 7

“Just hold very still.” 

These words inevitably follow the consumption of alcohol and precede injury. This time it is not going to be his; surprising, since they’re coming from Poe Dameron’s mouth, but a welcome change of pace. This time it’s Hayfa who is smart enough to know better, but cheery enough to be a good sport. They picked up supplies today, and it’s almost certainly their last. No telling how many sites they’re for (it had been a large load) but they’re coming to the end of their time on the  _ Observer _ . Soon they’ll find a nice crowded spaceport, bid their goodbyes to their war buddies, and go off on other individual adventures. It’s less daunting after his hours-long conversation with Marshall, the quirky counselor who had appeared from nowhere next to him in the cafeteria long after all the revelers had passed out. He’d opened up to the strange man in a way he normally could only do with his closest friends, and the man had given him some techniques to try, questions to ask himself. By the time that Marshall vanished again, it no longer felt like  _ the _ end, but  _ an _ end.

Finn’s well-acquainted with Poe’s ability to fly ships but seeing him extend that skill to the drone currently adding a second glass onto to the one already on Hayfa’s head is still impressive. There’s a flat disc between them and she’s got good equilibrium to balance them both as one tower. Betton readies another full glass. The game will continue until the rec room is soaked with spilled alcohol and broken glass. This is what happens when Poe stays in one place too long; he’s been on the  _ Observer _ ever since shuttling Hux to his meeting, and boredom is setting in, even with Finn’s attempts to keep him distracted. 

Hux watches with amusement from one of the long gaming tables near the rec room door. He’d been monopolizing Hayfa all night, asking questions about rudimentary science concepts and jotting her responses down on a datapad. She’d enjoyed answering, always eager to slip into technobabble. When she’d joined in with the drinking games, Hux had also paused his foray into the scientific world, signing up as one of the four players in the district-building game that Finn finds way too dull to play. When Hux realizes he’s being watched, he tips a nod at Finn. Politely, he nods back.

The First Order is gone. Hux has no rank. Finn is no longer a child soldier. They’re just who they are, refining to their new surroundings. 

Finn makes his way over to an empty seat near Hux. “How can you play that? It’s so boring.”  
The whirring of the drone’s propeller blades starts again as Poe pilots glass number three.

“It does lack the thrill of impending destruction,” Hux replies wryly, his eyes moving from Finn to just above Hayfa where the drone hovers. 

Poe is focusing so hard that he’s squinting. He lines up the glass perfectly before resting it with an undrone-like gentleness. The small crowd cheers as the glass remains steadily in position. 

“We should have Rey try that with the Force,” says Finn, mostly joking. No doubt with the proper cajoling from Poe, she’d give it a try, but it’s a stupid game.

“Or you could use the amplifier and take the challenge on yourself.”

That damned amplifier is something that Finn is not going to miss. “No thanks, I’m good.”

Hux’s turn consists of a test strike against an adjacent quadrant, mostly for reconnaissance, and then fortification. It’s impossible not to see the similarity in his tactics here to those of the former general’s in real life. Those few holographic city occupants whom Hux sacrifices for the good of intel could easily have been stormtroopers.

After play continues on in a clockwise fashion, Hux says to him, “I was never so myopic as to lose sight of my troops being flesh and blood.” Finn stills, fearful of this conversation, of hearing something that he can’t handle. “But I did view the stormtroopers as lesser.” He makes eye contact, holding it with gravity. “I knew they were trained to obey, discouraged from forming their own thoughts, and I thought them beneath me for this. I was wrong.”

A conversation this intense shouldn’t be happening across the room from an ill-advised drinking game, but Finn had opened it up to this when he’d invited a dialogue. He doesn’t want the guy’s apology, and not just because it’s too little too late, but because he doesn’t want to forgive. He wants to leave his past behind him and instead, he’s socially handcuffed to the guy that created it.

Applause goes up around them as a fourth glass is added to the scientist’s head. Poe announces that he’s going for five and it sounds final, but Finn suspects that he’ll climb to six anyway, assuming that the fifth doesn’t result in the glass shattering wave of jet juice that they’re all waiting for. 

“I don’t owe you forgiveness,” says Finn, voice low and a little angry.

“Good, because I wouldn’t know how to apologize,” Hux replies. 

Maybe this is just where they are now, at this impasse. They’re each in each other’s lives for the foreseeable future and they’re making do. If, as Poe has come to believe, the guy really has changed, then he should understand why Finn is reluctant to forgive. He’d been really, really bad. No amount of acknowledging stormtroopers’

inherent life value or teaching school children about logical fallacies is going to atone for the shit he’s done. 

Even with the drone carrying its last glass to the stack above Hayfa’s head, everyone’s attention turns to the cloaked older man who enters the rec room; it starts as a freezing wave from those closest to the door (the ones seated at the two gaming tables) to where Poe stands, hands on the drone’s controller unit. When Luke Skywalker, last Jedi and conqueror of the Empire, enters, people notice. He crosses the few steps from the door to where Finn sits, ass halfway off a chair to best converse with Hux. “You,” he says. “You’re coming with me.”

The room is (spontaneously) quiet enough that Finn feels more than a little self-conscious. “Me? Why me?”

“You’re flying me to the girl.”

“To... Rey?”

Luke’s hand reaches out and grabs Finn’s shoulder, his grip tighter than the situation warrants. “There you go with the brilliant questions again. Come on.” The grip half hauls him up and Finn’s very confused about what’s going on, but if Rey is involved, he’s ready (not to mention, the grip is very insistent), so he follows. So does Hux, and, trailing behind him, is Poe who thinks this is important enough a conversation to ditch his challenge and leave Hayfa to her damp fate. 

“Not you,  _ General _ ,” sneers Luke, eyes blazing at Hux from within his cloak. “This isn’t one of your goodwill missions.”

Finn doesn’t think he imagines the hurt in Hux’s eyes. “If this concerns Rey, then it concerns me,” Hux asserts, but he’s uncertain, and either he’s emoting way more than usual or Finn is learning his tells. 

“That’s very sweet, but we don’t need romantic gestures right now. Me and this genius,” says Luke with a thumb jerked at Finn, “can help her more than you can.”

“Hey!” objects Finn. 

Luke walks off without them, insults and dismissal already pitched, assuming that Finn will just take the abuse and follow; he’s right, but that doesn’t make it any less aggravating. Finn and Hux exchange angry looks. “He’s an ass.”

Hux shakes his head. “He’s a Force user. He knows that she’s losing herself to the dark side.” 

“Is he flying to her?” asks Poe. 

Finn shrugs. He doesn’t know any more than they do. So far all his interactions with Luke have left him feeling like a bumbling idiot and he doesn’t appreciate that; he would rather do that for himself. “I guess.”

“Are you coming?” calls Luke from down the long corridor. He doesn’t even bother looking back. 

“I’ll contact you when I can,” Finn says to Hux. He’ll do his best to keep him in the loop, but first, he has to get into that loop himself. He also taps Poe on the chest and flashes him a small smile before leaving. Like so many things that they do, this sounds dangerous, and he’d hate to not have said goodbye to his friend if things turn south. 

As he briskly walks to catch up to the Jedi, he hears Hux and Poe talking to each other. He can’t make out the words, but he hears an underlying hysteria in Hux’s voice. It’s subtle, but there, if you know what to look for, and somehow over the past months, he’s learned to do just that.

There aren’t many people in the docking bay. There aren’t many people left on the  _ Observer _ period, and it takes longer to get assigned a ship and cleared for takeoff than Luke is happy with. He glowers at Rickman as though he’s personally responsible for all the galaxy’s ills while Finn goes over their options for ship choices, and then at both of them for waiting for approval from General Organa. When he tells Luke that he wants to run to medbay for the amplifier first, he’s sure that the older man is going to Force choke him, but instead, his cold blue eyes narrow and he says, “Go quickly. I can pilot this without you.”

Finn does not doubt that. Even as a stormtrooper he’d heard about Luke Skywalker and his once-in-a-lifetime shot that took out the Death Star. He’s lucky that Luke’s including him, even if he seems to want to use him as a glorified taxi service. He legitimately sprints to medbay. He’s panting when he gets back but the ship is still there when he does, Luke having settled himself comfortably into a seat, pulling up his robe around him like a blanket. 

“So, where are we going?” Finn asks, easing the ship out into space.

  
  
  


They are an hour out when Luke stands up, stretches his back and arms as best he can with a cockpit ceiling that nearly touches his head, and calls out, “Are you just gonna hide the whole trip?”

Finn, assuming that the older man is speaking to him since it’s just the two of them, asks, “What?” Then, he hears a shuffling sound from behind him. With large eyes, he watches as Hux extricates himself from a crumpled tarp he’d vaguely assumed was left there following a supply run. “What the hell?” Then, after some more rustling, familiar wavy dark hair peeks out as well. “Poe!?” 

Both men look incredibly sheepish, though Finn would bet all he owned that it was not Poe Dameron’s first time stowing away on a ship. “We didn’t feel like getting left out.”

“You knew they were there?” accuses Finn. He feels duped, and so Luke’s tradition of making him feel like an idiot continues.

Luke sighs. Of course he knew. When Finn has the amplifier turned up, he can sense the people around him like a familiar scent. It doesn’t explain why the Force user didn’t speak up about their stowaways, but he has a feeling that if he was to ask, he’d just get some scathing remark back.

“Leia’s gonna flip when she finds out you’re off-ship,” he says to Hux instead. 

Hux reattaches his confidence, tugging at his clothes as though straightening a uniform, before answering. “Yes, probably, though I do have the same escort that I did when allowed to travel last time.”

“Oh yeah,” says Poe, realizing something. He smushes a confused face at Hux. “Shouldn’t your tracker being going off?”

Luke, his stretches complete, sits back down and again wraps himself up. His face is one of cool nonchalance as he watches space pass by them, clearly not part of the conversation anymore. 

“Yes,” answers Hux. 

“But it’s not,” says Poe.

“That much is obvious.” Then, directing his attention to Finn, he asks, “Has he said what he’s sensed is happening with Rey?”

“No, he hasn’t,” Luke answers. 

“Should I be addressing you directly,  _ Master _ Skywalker?” 

Finn groans. He doesn’t need to deal with two sarcastic shitheads and at this point, he’s not sure whether he’d rather jettison Hux or Luke. “Okay, so you guys are on board. Rey isn’t that far, so maybe you two should just sit back and let me fly us there, okay?”

Both Hux and Poe obey what must have sounded less like a request and more like a command, taking two of the available four seats without a fuss. Even though the method had been unconventional, he feels better that they’re here, now that he’s getting over the shock. He shouldn’t have been surprised at all. He knows that Poe, despite being loyal to the point of absurdity with General Leia, likes to bend rules, and Hux, well it makes sense that he’d do whatever it took to get to Rey. He may not entirely trust the sick bastard, but he does genuinely seem neck-deep in love with Rey. She might need all of them. Finn doesn’t know. 

  
  


Unnamed Planet

Rey’s body is thrumming, attuned to the dark side emanations from the rainforest and Kylo Ren himself, a separate known sensation that she only now realizes she’d have been able to spot from a thousand kilometers away. The innate power amplifies his, just like the little device that Hayfa had concocted, but broader; it tugs insistently on those tendrils that are becoming thick vines within her. 

Everything is wet. The trees with their huge palm-shaped leaves only protect from the direct impact of the rain but not its soaking effect. Her feet slip often on the slick self-made path she forges with her lightsaber. Angry simians shout wordless complaints but they stay clear of the bright weapon destroying their territory. Birds startle and flutter away on lovely colorful feathers. She’s almost to him, the end of her long journey, and she notices neither the wild beauty around her nor the mud coating her arms. 

He knows she’s here. His mind touches hers gently, invites her closer. He’s been waiting for her. There’s something kindred in his darkness; she’s felt it before in him and in herself, despite her best efforts to convince herself otherwise. She’d answered honestly when she’d told the vision on En-Teska that she has no idea what she’s going to do when she finds him, even now when she spies a dark figure in a clearing ahead. She knows that anger, hatred, fear, and obsession control her now, and the small part of her that’s left is a prisoner to those things. The woman who laughs when Finn does his impression of Leia is crushed underneath the fallen structure of Rey, vanquisher of Supreme Leader Snoke, and the responsibilities of that guardianship that she’d adopted.

Kylo isn’t wearing his mask, and he looks older, more tired. She sees herself reflected in his mind: a soaking wet crazed girl with eyes that burn like the Jakku suns. It’s jarring, this image, and she blocks it, protecting herself from the undistorted truth. 

There’s less to trip over here with the plantlife cleared away, forming a wide circle around the small building behind Kylo, but the mud sucks at her boots, as tricky as walking through sand. She slowly crosses the distance between them, lightsaber still in her hand and still glowing ferociously in the dim light. 

“I killed your knights,” she says. 

“I know.” The lack of sorrow or surprise in his voice triggers a realization in her, one that she should have had long ago, or maybe she knew but kept from herself. 

“You’re the one who gave the pirate the coordinates,” she accuses. 

“I am,” he admits solemnly.

“You wanted this to happen to me. You wanted to poison me with the dark side.”

It takes effort to keep his thoughts and feelings out of her head. When he’d kidnapped her and interrogated her, she hadn’t known what the Force felt like. Swimming through his mind had come so easily, and now that they’re both tainted, his thoughts cling like mud to her boots pulling her down. She doesn’t want to feel his pride or his earnestness to see her fall, to see her become as loathsome as he. 

“I thought maybe if you saw those places… saw the power of the dark side…of what you could become…”

“Oh, I saw their  _ power _ .” Her voice raises. “All the power to subjugate the life around them. They take and take and it doesn’t even make them happy.” She thinks of the congregation watching the sacrifice, how that boy was someone’s child or brother. “I don’t even know why they do it.” 

“When will you learn that you can’t lie to me?” he asks, as though they’ve known each other their whole lives and not a handful of hours when trillions of people were vaporized. It works somehow, though, because she does feel like she understands him, terrifying though it is. He’d seen into her on the  _ Finalizer _ , seen her loneliness and isolation, and she’d seen his layers, the conflict within him, the little boy that had once loved his mother. This Kylo Ren isn’t conflicted. This Kylo Ren has had a year of being his own master, has had who knows how long wading through this rainforest of darkness, and he has made his peace with his role. “You know why they do it. Say it. Say why they chose power over happiness.”

She doesn’t want the words on her tongue, and so she lets them roll off, hoping to purge them. “Because they don’t want to be victims anymore.” The admission hurts like when she’s too stubborn to take a drink after Gargon Gumbo. 

“And you, Rey, are you tired of being a victim?”

A little girl sold to Unkar Plutt. Rey knows about being weak, knows about being a victim. She’d hardened up quickly, learned how to fight to protect herself from the type of men who saw her as an easy target. She’d learned how to scavenge to keep the jaws of hunger from her belly. She hasn’t been that little girl for so long and yet she still is her in so many ways. When she listens with an attentive ear pressed flat against Hux’s chest to the sign of life that beats beneath fearing that it will just stop and leave her alone again, it’s the girl. When she eats quickly, food close to her chest, and Poe teases her about having a second stomach, it’s the girl. When she can’t focus on her exercises and Leia sighs in frustration and she’s convinced her master will tell her their training is done for good, that she isn’t enough, it’s the girl. 

“I know that you’re afraid,” says Kylo. “You don’t have to be. You can take it.”

She can take it and she’s ashamed at the capacity for it that she has. Maybe her parents had sensed this in her, and that’s why they left. Maybe they didn’t have the courage to kill her outright and had just dropped her off on Jakku, hoping the desert would do the job for them. “It’s not something that can just be picked up and tossed away,” she says, but he already knows that. He’s something forged from the darkness now. “You want the whole galaxy,” she guesses.

“It can be ours. We’re not limited, not anymore. All its power is ours. We can make it what we want.”

No more military men snatching children to turn into soldiers. No more starving children squeezed into dangerous spaces to find scrap to sell. No more apathetic Jedi cloistering themselves away while the galaxy burns. Everyone physically forced to be kind to each other, to stop using other people like they were disposable objects. The possibilities swirl in her head louder than trapped Rey’s cries. 

“Ours?” she asks dazedly.

“Whatever we want.”

A small smile climbs up her right cheek. “Why would I include you?” she asks, raising her lightsaber in front of her.

  
  
  


_ Stay away _ , reverberates through Hux’s mind, and it’s more than just words but also intent. It hits the others at the same time as evidenced by the hand that Luke raises quickly to his head, and Finn’s stumble.

“She sounds pissed,” says Poe, behind them all on the Rey-created rainforest path. 

She isn’t angry; she doesn’t want them to witness what she’s becoming. Hux can feel all her emotions even from here, their continued bond giving him insight into the deep waves of shame and desperation overthrowing her common sense. 

Kylo Ren is still alive when they reach the man-made clearing though not for much longer. The gloom of impending evening is lit by two lightsabers, Rey’s and the fractured red monstrosity that so amply reflects Kylo’s twisted soul, and by their light, the newcomers can see how the battle is going and how close it is to ending. Kylo Ren is down a leg, the severed limb lying like discarded trash in the mud, and he sways unsteadily awaiting Rey’s next attack. Hux should feel gratification at the sight, his torturer injured and soon to be struck down, but his worry for Rey transcends that. The scene isn’t one of his revenge, but of his love’s descent into the dark side. 

“Rey!” calls out Finn.

Even knowing that they were coming, probably feeling every single step of their progress through the rainforest, she regards them with wide shocked eyes, her lightsaber still protectively between her and Kylo Ren. She looks completely out of her mind. She’s coated with mud and bits of plant and, as her opponent is similarly begrimed, they must have fought a tremendous battle. Her shoulder is dripping blood, surprising given their weapon choice, and she’s leaning more on the foot that hadn’t suffered the infection.

_ I told you to stay away, _ she thinks at them, looking between Finn and Kylo as though she expects an attack from either one. 

Kylo Ren’s face looks white as stormtrooper armor in the mud-free places. Even with the cauterized wound, he’s still lost most of his leg, and his body is probably enjoying shock like Hux’s own had undergone when the  _ Antioch _ had smashed his spine. As a credit to the psychotic sith-wannabe’s perseverance though, he’s still brandishing his lightsaber as though he intends to win, though he’s so distracted by the appearance of Luke Skywalker that he’s not taking the clear opening that they’ve given him to attack Rey. 

“You!” Kylo Ren shouts out at the Jedi.

It’s been over a year since Hux has heard that voice. Even without the vocoder, it’s deep and scary, true to the nightmares Hux still has, and even though it’s not directed at him, a very primitive part of his brain warns him to run. Instead, he watches with fascinated horror as Luke steps forward and pushes back the hood of his robe, confronting his nephew and inserting himself into a battle clearly not his own. That’s what they’ve all done. The epic fight that led to the deep mud furrows around the clearing should be between the two Force titans alone. All that remains is one more strike of Rey’s lightsaber left to finish it.

“It’s over,” Luke proclaims. Well, that much is obvious. Kylo's body is teetering unsteadily on his bent leg, stomach folded too far over in his pain. He expects Kylo to object, to make a foolhardy Force-powered leap to try his lightsaber against Luke’s face in one last attempt. Instead, it’s Rey’s voice he hears, and Hux realizes that the Jedi had been speaking to her, not to his nephew.

A deep defensiveness rises in Hux. They’re here to help Rey, not stop her. She’s in a bad state, but she’s like this for them. Everything she’s put herself through has been to save all of them. Each battle she fought, each location she searched buried her light further down until even he can barely see it, and he knows she can’t. She thinks she’s already lost herself to it, but he knows better. There isn’t a fight out there that Rey can’t win. She is passion itself, an unquenchable fire that others turn to for warmth. If this cynical unkempt excuse for a Jedi can’t see it then he doesn’t deserve to wear the title.

But the Rey that answers him is barely Rey. In a timbre not her own, she responds, “It’s just the beginning.”

Her thoughts are screams, her body tense as an electric current, and her soul as dark and sticky as treacle when she strikes at Kylo Ren. The power of the blow, even successfully met with his own lightsaber, knocks him to the ground, his lightsaber landing hilt down in the mud beyond his reach. She raises her weapon again, ready to mete out a death sentence, but Luke is between them suddenly, the old man moving fast as the wind to firmly create a barrier of blue plasma. On the ground, Kylo Ren gapes in shock as his enemy stands against Rey. Who’s to say how the reasons are proportioned: protection of his nephew, the galaxy, Rey’s soul. The most minor of these to Luke is probably the greatest to Hux, but his feelings aren’t being factored in. He’s just a bystander as powerless as he’d been underneath the  _ Antioch _ ’s rubble.

“Don’t give into the hate inside of you!” yells Luke.

Rey eases off, pacing in small steps, waiting for an opening. “What do you care?” she growls. “Go back to your island! Keep your head in the sand and wait for me to fix your mess!”

Her disappointment in the legendary Skywalker had cut her deeply. She’d hoped he’d fill in a paternal hole in her heart, one that Han Solo had briefly filled, and his rejection was so much more tangled up with her parental issues than it had any cause to be. Even still, her accusation has merit. The man had hidden away while the boy he’d mistrained went on an interplanetary killing spree. His sister fights as Rey does, for everyone else’s cause, while he plays disgruntled hermit far from the threat of the First Order. 

Hux notices from the corner of his eye that Finn is fiddling with something. He recognizes the device instantly as the Force amplifier and he hopes the former stormtrooper knows what he’s doing. 

“You’re giving it exactly what it wants. It’s using you,” warns Luke. “Whatever it’s promised you, it won’t give it.”

“It doesn’t give,” she agrees. “It only takes.” It sounds like a mantra, one that Hux has never heard before. There’s a flash of recognition, though, across Kylo’s damaged face. Calling out the nature of the dark side doesn’t seem to be lessening her resolve to destroy, though, because she’s prowling, looking for an opportunity to get to Kylo. There’s a reluctance in her to go through Luke that Hux doesn’t understand. Given how angry she is about his refusal to train her, it shouldn’t be difficult to rend him in two as she had Snoke. Luke, or the concept of Luke, means something to her. 

“Only takes,” echoes Kylo. His hands, formerly propping up his upper body pat at the ground in front of him, like a blind man trying to find something, and Luke eyes the movement warily. He hadn’t intended to provide the two a common enemy, but that’s exactly what he’s done because Kylo’s lightsaber unsticks itself from the mud, flings itself towards its owner under the direct control of Rey. In less than a heartbeat, the weapon veers wide, landing closer to the interlopers, and Luke presses a foot down onto Kylo’s wrist attempting to prevent the catch. 

“No!” cries out Rey, surprised face turning to Finn. Her eyes narrow. 

Hux and Poe watch as the two mentally argue about Finn’s intervention, both wishing they could hear what was being said, though each can guess their own beloved’s portion. It doesn’t last long, only long enough for Luke to release Kylo’s wrist, saying something in a low voice that the dark side user denies with a violent twisting of his head. Then, Finn’s taking the conversation to the air, “You can’t stop people from doing bad shit, Rey. We’re not like BB8. We’re going to make good choices and bad choices. We can’t just kill everyone that ever hurts anyone else.”

Oh, Hux is well aware of that desire. It seems so simple. Everyone should just behave exactly as they should. A galaxy of obedient stormtroopers. He forms the image as best he can in his mind and passes it through to her via their strangled connection. It catches her attention, and he realizes how little she’s been looking at him; that’s the shame’s doing. He shakes his head. “It’s what the First Order tried to do. Uniformity. Did the  _ Finalizer _ seem beautiful to you?” he asks.

“I can do it better.” 

“You’ve given the galaxy enough,” says Hux. He doesn’t tell her she can’t do it better, because in this context that could mean she would be a more powerful emperor than Palpatine, and he doesn’t want her to see it as a dare. He knows better than to tell her she can’t do something. “He’s here, and he’s not getting away. You’ve done what they asked.”

“He needs to die,” she seethes. He hopes that the desperation lacing the edges of her rage means that his Rey is fighting. 

“You can’t stop her!” calls Kylo, his body trembling. “She’s more powerful than any of you.”

“You got a death wish?” asks Poe with uncharacteristic anger.

“He’s right,” says Hux. “We can’t stop you. Be selfish for once. Let someone else deal with him. Come back with us.”

“The dark side already has her!” 

“No!” Finn contradicts Kylo’s hysterical pronouncement. “Rey belongs with us. The dark side can’t have her because she’s ours!” Finn’s large eyes sparkle with conviction. 

“But if it takes me and I end all the bad…” she says, conviction wavering. The kind of trade she’s suggesting is impossible. 

“You can’t make things right by doing evil,” Hux corrects. If anyone knows this, it’s him.

“I don’t care if it stopped every asshole in the galaxy. We’re not going to let the dark side have you. We are always going to be your family. You have a home with us. Wherever we are.”

“The island?” Rey whispers and, Saraboth in all her glory, Hux could kiss Poe for having implanted the stupid idea in her head. When she’d told him about it, a former resistance pilot, stormtrooper, First Order general, and Jedi apprentice waiting tables and getting drunk on sandy beaches, he’d thought it the silliest thing he’d ever heard. She’d loved it, and the still light part of her still does. 

“Yeah,” says Finn. “Those drinks aren’t going to put umbrellas in themselves.” 

It happens incrementally, the lowering of her lightsaber; Hux’s heart soars with every slow centimeter. With it, the connection between them re-opens, and he can still hear the terror, the rage, the determination, but under the confusion is appreciation, love. She feels loved.

Hux hadn’t been wrong about Kylo Ren’s last-ditch effort to win, only about the timing, and though his eyes are rolling about in his head, body attempting to shut itself down after losing a limb, Kylo’s Force powers are just as strong as ever, and they’re all so focused on Rey, that the red trifurcated lightsaber is already well on its way to Luke before the sound of its power igniting catches their attention. 

Simultaneously, Rey freezes it mid-air close enough to Luke’s back that a sneeze would end his life and Poe fires a blaster that had at some point materialized in his hand. It shouldn’t be something as simple as a blaster that finally brings Kylo Ren’s reign of terror to an end, and it really shouldn’t be charismatic Poe Dameron that fired the shot, but Kylo’s body lurches back from the blast and doesn’t again get back up. 

Luke turns slowly, cautiously observing the levitating lightsaber. He looks up at Rey next, trying to judge how likely it is that she’ll let the thing rip through him now that she’s had time to consider it. “Have you made up your mind yet?” he asks her, snarky even now with his life dangling like one of Marshall’s earrings.

Rey stares at the dead body of Kylo Ren with growing emotion. She’s not expending a single iota of concern about Luke. Hux can follow the volume but not the direction of her thoughts. He exchanges a quick worried glance with Finn. Ren has been her obsession for so long, the reason why she’d subjected herself to the personality-altering ramifications of searching dark side locations, and now he’s been eradicated unceremoniously with a single blaster shot.

Hux approaches carefully. When he touches her shoulder, the spell breaks, the lightsaber dropping to the ground. He opens his arms and she falls into them, mud and blood and all. “I could have done everything,” she says into his chest. “I could have been one of them.”

He’s not sure whether it’s horror in her voice or regret, so he doesn’t respond. Instead, he holds her tightly and allows his fear to melt away in her strong presence. He will always need her more than she needs him and he’s okay with that.

“We need to get her out of here. You three get her on the  _ Falcon, _ ” says Luke. He looks down at his nephew’s body with deep sorrow. “We’ll take the resistance ship back.”

Rey’s still whispering against his skin, the two sides of herself still warring even now. They’ll get her home, wherever home ends up, but they need to get her away from this place urgently. She has a lot of dark side detoxing to do. 


	8. Chapter 8

“You thought it was gross before,” laughs Betton as he removes the tracker from Hux’s ankle with a small tool. “You gotta stop playing in the mud, my friend.”

He’d come straight over to Betton’s quarters after Rey had fallen asleep following the world’s longest shower. They’d taken it together, him shampooing her hair until the only brown left was her natural hue and holding her soapy exhausted frame until the water ran cold. 

Betton’s quarters are cozy. He has two chairs draped with fuzzy lap blankets. His bed is piled high with pillows and warm fleece. The walls have pictures of nearly everyone that was ever on the  _ Raddus _ creating a wallpaper of happy memories. Every shelf is full of things like trophies or decorative knick-knacks. Betton’s lived a full life, judging by the contents of the room. 

“How much trouble did you get in with the General for not resetting the alarm on my tracker?” Hux asks quietly. 

A sheepish grin appears under Betton’s beard, an admission if ever there was one. “I don’t think the boss lady is too worried about you flying the coop as long as Rey’s here.”

Hux shakes his head. “It was a senseless risk. Why take it?”

The large man shrugs. “Didn’t feel like having to get up in the middle of the night to deal with that screeching again. And…” he holds up the still mud-caked tracker, “it looks like I made the right call.”

Hux has never deserved the good people of the resistance. He’ll be making it up to them the rest of his life, trying to make himself worthy of the trust they’ve given him. “It would have made the trip out a lot less pleasant,” he concedes. 

“Is Rey gonna be okay?”

“Yes. By the time we disband on Coruscant, I think she’ll be back to her old self.” It’s a guess. She’d loosened immediately after they’d left behind the dark planet. He imagines she’ll have a lot of stories to tell him once she wakes up. He still wants to know about the shoulder wound that he’d patched up himself (she refused to go to medbay). They’ll have time. There are still supplies to dole out on their way back to the resistance’s final resting spot.

“Glad to hear that. She’s a special gal.”

“Yes,” Hux agrees. “There’s no one else like her in the galaxy.”

  
  
  


The memorial for Ben Solo is understandably somber. Having never been to a memorial before, Hux had prepared Rey for speeches about who Ben had been, crying, and, knowing Leia, perhaps a drunken outburst. There is none of that. Leia remains brutally sober and tear-less. Conversation among the few attendees is sparse with the closest thing to a speech being words whispered to the container holding Kylo’s ashes. Considering the role they’d played in finding and killing him, Rey and Poe’s attendance feels disrespectful, but she wants to support her master and Leia had invited them.

When Luke sits next to her, Rey wants to get up and walk away. She’s still too volatile to deal with his brand of interaction, and even if he’d come through in the end, his participation had taken far too long. He’s quiet like everyone else at first. 

_ Do you need me? _ she hears Hux wonder. He’s discussing the curriculum that he’s been so hard at work on with Leia whose enthusiasm for anything following the death of her son has been non-existent. With the war behind them, now is the time for her to try and find peace if she can. She’ll be alright. There’s solid iron in her will. Also, from what Rey understands, Luke will stay with her this time so she won’t be alone. 

_ I can handle it _ , she thinks back to him. 

“Is my sister a good teacher?” 

It’s more the question itself than the raspy voice, but she bristles at both. With a firm chin she replies, “Yes, she’s a terrific mentor.” 

His eyes twinkle mischievously. “Oh good. I never was a very good teacher.”

Luke is strangely resistant to her glare. It passes through him, or maybe even feeds his impish amusement. “Is that why then?” she asks. 

He shrugs. “Well, given how things went with Ben, it didn’t seem like a role I was really cut out for.” He looks around the room and she follows his lead. Poe and Finn are whispering together, both noticing the conversation occurring between her and the Jedi master but trying not to very obviously be watching. Hux, though speaking, is attuned to her as closely as though he was sitting between them. The lovely lady who had been present for Hux’s trial, Holdo, is there, having joined them upon hearing the news, and she’s pouring herself some champagne. “I do better in the sarcastic old man role. I think Han would have liked that.”

Rey understands his explanation even if she’s too personally offended to agree with it. She could have used his help, not that she would have been likely to take it, when she’d been visiting the places of power. Thinking that reminds her of a question she had. “Will you be going to the Jedi temples, the ones we found the map for?”

He shakes his head. “Nah, I think I’m going to stay put by Leia, but if ever a young motivated person was interested in starting the whole thing back up, she’d know where to start.” 

Against the judgment of the blackness still in her, Rey’s lip curls upward slightly. “Well, it would be a shame to have only one Jedi in the galaxy, especially when he is notoriously unfriendly.”

“Oh yeah, that guy is a dick,” agrees Luke before rising off the couch and mingling again. 

Rey, left alone, shakes her head, and eventually begins to smile. 

  
  
  


Epilogue

“You could pass as my sister now!” exaggerates Finn with a laugh. 

“Oh, there he goes making it weird.” 

The suns are high and the air is hot. Even the breeze which ruffles the tall trees is warm; the only time it feels otherwise is right after they’ve gotten out of the ocean. She doesn’t have to bundle up to keep it from singeing her anymore, though she’s smart enough to stay in the shade when she’s not in the water. The three of them are lazing about on beach towels with the shade of the nearby dosel tree creeping slowly away from them. She’s got her toes sneaking out into the rays of sunshine, gold lacquer that Marshall had gifted her glinting happily on each tiny nail. They’re crusty with golden sand, a pervasive nuisance but one to which she’s become accustomed.

Poe won’t be here much longer; his shift starts in the early afternoon, but he’s got one arm over Finn like he’s gonna just hang around all day. They’re cute together like that, always touching, but then, she and Hux hadn’t been much better after they’d realized that their friendship had become something else.

“No one’s making it weird, man. That’s literally always you,” accuses Finn. He pokes his finger into Poe’s nose. Poe promptly bites it causing Finn to cry out and move farther away, sand shuffling beneath him as he does.

When Rey feels Hux’s presence, it’s like a glow brighter than the sun within her. She springs up to her feet, eyes darting even though she knows he’s not quite here yet. She telegraphs where they are through their Force connection as she slips on her sandals.

“Uh oh,” says Finn. “I think the general has arrived.” 

“Aw man, not that guy,” teases Poe. 

Rey watches for him. He finally appears over the ridge of sand. His brisk walk turns into a near run though he’s juggling a suitcase and a pet carrier after he spots her, and she smiles like an idiot at him. 

He sets the luggage into the sand at her feet and places both of his large delicate hands on her face. “I thought my memory exaggerated your beauty, Scavenger, but it undersold it by far.”

He kisses her, and it’s been so long that it takes her back to their first kiss when she’d brought him that handwritten poem. She’d been so eager to get it just right. She’d even asked C3PO to find her the exact words. When she’d arrived with it hidden behind her back, he’d looked at her with such a deep affection that she’d wished it was actually a valuable gift instead of her just-learning chicken scratch. He reacted as though it was and when he touched her cheek, she’d kissed him. It was both of their first kisses, and it was timid but perfect. She remembers those feelings now.

Though the moment’s romance is quickly broken by loud gagging noises from Finn and Poe. Rey is the first to break off the kiss, sensing the two men coming to join them. 

“Been a long three months…” says Poe with an eyebrow waggle. “I’m thinking that you’re going to make that volcano active again just by proximity.”

“Oh, come on man, I don’t need to hear that!” complains Finn. “It’s bad enough that she’s got that mushy look on her face.”

“Yeah, you get the same look when I get off work,” says Poe. While Finn denies this he mouths to Rey, ‘He does.’ The two tussle a bit, more children than grown adult men. Rey loves it. She laughs freely at their antics. Hux’s hand slides around her bare waist. It has been a long three months.

“Welcome back, man,” offers Poe, bumping the back of his hand on Hux’s shoulder.

Finn offers a nod, which is plenty from him. She can’t even sense a bit of loathing from him, even if there’s not enthusiasm. It’s a start.

“Welcome to the Calely Islands, Millicent,” Rey says to the carrier. The cat looks less than excited about her current predicament. “And you, we ought to get you inside.” With his complexion, he’ll burn to a crisp in under an hour. 

The three-bedroom apartment that Poe found them is close enough to the water to be intimidating to Rey who had lain awake more than one night in the beginning afraid that it would wash inside and drown her. She leads the way. After he sets down his suitcase, she shows him the hidey hole she’d made for Millie in her closet. The furniture that came with the room is mostly made with a thin delicate wood and she knows that the cat’s nails will cause the landlord much consternation, but it’s a small price to pay to have Hux with her again.

They leave the cat alone in the room with the carrier door open, re-joining Poe and Finn in the main living area of the apartment. A pitcher of iced tea has appeared on the table and she pours herself and Hux glasses. It’s non-alcoholic; she’d quickly realized that she detests being tipsy when it’s hot.

“So, what are things like on Vardos?” asks Poe. 

Hux sighs. “Classes begin next week, so we shall soon find out.” His red hair is showing around the roots of his artificially black hair and she makes a note that they could both use touching up on their disguise. She loves how long it’s gotten. More than that, she loves the way that he’s sitting, so at ease. “It’s been… a lot of work.”

“Rey’s been talking about making herself a school at one of the old Jedi temple locations,” Finn says, ratting her out.

She winces a little, since this is not something she’s vocalized with Hux. Apologetically, she says, “It’s an idea that Luke put into my head that I haven’t been able to shake.”

“Training padawans?” Hux asks with a devilish grin.

“Tease me all you want. You started this school idea.”

“Jedi Master Rey has a good sound to it,” says Finn. “Maybe you could add Force training to the Vardos curriculum.”

At the sharp disdain she senses from the suggestion, Rey laughingly shoots it down. “I don’t think that would fit Hux’s ideology-free objective.”

“You should have flight lessons,” offers Poe.

“As much as I appreciate suggestions, I am tired to my bones of fretting about the academy,” confides Hux. “I would much rather hear about what we’ll be doing here.”

“Well, we’ve got a part-time position at the gift shop. How do you think you’ll be at selling novelty items?” Tour guide hadn’t been her thing, but her very illegal trespassing into the heart of the volcano had; her old scavenging ways had not vanished simply because she’d uncovered a better life for herself. The retail work is fun only because no one recognizes her and they treat her like a sales girl instead of a savior. The expectations for her here are non-existent, and she’s just enjoying being lost to anonymity. 

“I think with my aptitude for persuasiveness that I’m overqualified for sales work,” Hux says lightly. He lifts her hand up and places a small kiss on the back of it.  _ I somehow managed to convince the finest warrior in the galaxy to share my bed _ , he thinks at her. Let Finn and Poe believe that her blush is from the kiss and not Hux’s mental words.

“Come out with me tomorrow. You can shadow me and see if you think you want to work for Paradise Tours. It’ll give you the layout of the land anyway.”

Hux nods. “I’ll do that. Though I warn you, I’ve never been a particularly skilled pilot.”

Poe waves a dismissive hand. “Oh, it’s nothing tricky. You just fly the same route over and over again.”

“Or at least, you’re supposed to…” says Finn with a shaking head.

“Yeah, well… I got away with quite a few side trips until I had some tattletales on board.” He waggles a finger at Hux. “Always check if your tourists have big mouths and know your boss first.”

“Mister Resistance Wing Commander almost got his sorry ass fired from Paradise island tours.”

“Speaking of which…” says Finn. “I should probably get on to work.”

Finn, noticing the glances between Rey and Hux, opts to walk him out. They flash awkward smiles as they leave.

“I already want to live here forever,” says Hux, dipping her back so that she’s staring up from his arms into his face. 

“I’m not ruling it out,” she says. She touches the stubble on his chin, remembers the beard he’d grown when he’d been on trial. “Can you grow this out again?”

“I won’t rule it out,” he mimics. “Though we’ll have to dye that as well.”

“That’s okay.” She tugs at one of the long hairs that curl underneath his ear. “I miss the red.”

“I no longer miss anything.” He quotes something, a longer passage about no longer desiring anything because the speaker has everything. Then, he considers something. “I love you” She’s never heard the words from his lips and it catches her off guard, makes her stomach swirl and then warm. “I realize you know that already, but a certain Mr. Dameron thought it should be said as well.”

She says it back and the kisses they share after are impossibly sweet.

In a few years time she may start up a Jedi training camp or they may travel to Vardos so that Hux can be headmaster or they may go to Yavin IV and learn how to make Kes Dameron’s crawfish stew from the source. Whatever they do, they will do it together, all four of them. She’s okay not knowing. Every day she lives for its own sake. She’s no longer waiting for her family to arrive; she’s already formed one. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was super nice being back in this universe again. I love playing with a poetic, redeemed Hux. Thanks for reading!


End file.
